Categories: process

Two of the things I didn’t do in first draft which I knew immediately upon realizing I’d written myself toward a cliff and therefore had to do in second draft have now been done.  I had avoided doing these obvious, character-true things for purely superficial reasons.  I didn’t want to be rid of these trappings, but the character did and to not have him take advantage of the very first opportunity to make these changes to his own life skewed everything [...]

I give up on word counters.  After a good amount of progress, I had First Reader review, and I reviewed, and via her notes and my own sinking feelings, I realized the story had gone off the rails and was heading for a ditch.  Not a total loss — lots of good bits and pieces I can salvage — but the framework was just wrong, a relic of a prior draft of the story that didn’t reflect enough of the [...]