December was a rough month. January was a rough month. February was a rough month. March… well, we’ll see. So far it hasn’t been grand.
I like to write a bit every day, but lately life, stress, and the pile-up of things to do has gotten the better of me. I’m lucky if I can manage to write once or twice a week. Which right now is just enough to keep my blog serial Down the River going.
Part of it, too, is a schedule in turmoil, and persistent insomnia that leaves me unwilling or unable to get up early to write. So I am being proactive and tackling two birds with one stone. If I can’t get to sleep at night, why not stay up later, and write until I literally fall asleep at my keyboard from exhaustion?
Which leads me up to last night.
I’ve decided that I want to push through on Coredivers, the sequel to Dropnauts. I’m already a third of the way done, and it’s the one writing project that’s really tugging at me now and has my interest.
But after taking a three-month hiatus from the story, I find myself at the edge of a cliff, wondering what comes next. Where did I leave my intrepid characters? What were they doing last? And where do we go from here?
So I’m grabbing that umbrella and hoping the wind sweeps me across the gab.
I keep a running summary of each chapter of my novels in Excel – chapter number, name, title, scenes, scene POV character, and a short summary of the action. These are great for a) catching up after stepping away for a bit and b) building a painless story summary once the book is done, if I decide to submit the book to an agent or publisher.
But this summary-level info also misses the granular detail.
What was the tone of each scene? What are some of the little things that happened that might foreshadow later events, or need to be picked up on for the next chapter? What minor details might be important going forward?
Some of these issues will be cleaned up in second draft edits. But others are critical to keeping the story consistent as I move forward. There’s no substitute for a re-read of previously written work before forging ahead.
In Coredivers, I’m rotating through three different sets of characters and locations, so last night I went back to the group I plan to write next – three chapters ago – and went back over it from top to bottom, smoothing it out a bit and taking notes for things I want to include in the next one. It felt good to sink my writing teeth into the Redemption Cycle world again, and as it turns out, there were a lot of things in that chapter that I had forgotten.
Now, armed with a fresh read and my trigger notes, I’m ready to charge ahead to the next part of the story. As long as I can stay awake to do so LOL…
And if I still miss something?
That’s a second draft problem.
To my writer friends – how do you handle coming back to a partially-finished work after a long absence?