So, after buying a book because the author blogging her daily progress of wrting it fascinated me, I have decided to try my hand at something similar. My Nano project this year is going to be the rewrite of the first book of my vampire series. Because, yay me, I have finally gotten through enough of my revision course that I am on the actual rewrite, now. So, in keeping with my plan to blog daily about my progress, I’m going to kind of try to get you up to date.

I’ve spent the entirety of 2017 prepping this revision. I’ve had a lot to learn before I could get to the point of actually doing any writing. The original was a mess. I’m not going to get into the details of everything that went into planning this revision. Partly because I don’t even remember everything, anymore, and partly because it would probably bore you. At least as a recap. You might find it all more interesting if I was going over it as I was doing it. I guess we’ll find out once I have Book 2 written and ready to be taken through the gauntlet.

So, let me just tell you what I’ve been working on in October. Which has mainly been working out conflict arcs and fixing my timeline and my outline. It’s been a kind of frustrating process. Part of the problem has been because I write about vampires. Yes, this affects my timeline. After all, I have from sunset to sunrise. That’s it. There is no “caffeine and adrenaline” to fall back on when the days seem to be lasting too long. And, not only do I have from sunset to sunrise and that’s it – this book starts the end of March and ends the beginning of September. In other words, spring and summer – when the nights are shortest.

Of course, in some ways, the short nights end up helping. The fact that it’s the summer, and there is only so much time available in a night comes in handy with stretching this out over 5 months. And I need those 5 months, since one of the major subplots involves a pregnant werewolf. And pregnancy is a very definite timeframe that you can’t really play with too much. At least not without introducing other issues.

But, I’ve managed to get a proper timeline worked out, and in the process finished fixing my outline. I now have a very tightly plotted book where EVERYTHING happens for a reason, and there is an unrelenting march from the first scene to the last. And it is awesome. I love it. I also cried while working on it.

I am now playing with time a bit. Moving scenes around so they aren’t in chronological order. My opening scene is now a flash-forward. I have a few flashbacks. It turns out that fixing the timeline was a cinch compared to coming up with the best narrative outline, and I have one scene I’m still not too sure about the best place to put it. (At least partly because what is possibly the best place to put it has no way to segue into it – unless I go all “omniscent narrator” for the transition sentences. Which is not a technique I use anywhere else in the book. So… Not sure that will work.

But, I do have a reason for playing with scene order, beyond just wanting to find the best way to tell THIS story. Book 3 is my prequel. Except the narrative structure is kind of bizarre. It’s a frame story, with the frame taking place during the same time frame as books 1 and 2. The prequel part is going to be told in flashbacks. And told out of order as various events in the frame part of the story remind characters of things that happened in the past. It’s quite possibly going to be a structural nightmare. But! It has occurred to me that getting readers used to the idea of me playing with time a bit might help me not lose them when it comes to that one.

I am also really glad that I’m revising this book before writing book 2. I shudder to think of the mess I’d be making if I had written book 2 and then made all the changes I’m making to book 1. At least now I can go into 2 with all the events of 1 in mind. Not the least of the issues being that I’ve got characters that had originally been introduced in book 1 that ended up getting cut. I can just see me trying to make sense of characters that didn’t exist in book 1 randomly appearing in the first scene of book 2. That would have been fun – not.

Okay, that last paragraph was me babbling trying to get in my 100 words for a daily writing challenge before midnight while I wait for Nano to start. The fun starts in an hour. I’m in a weird place of part of me being excited, and part of me struggling to stay awake, because it is 11pm and I was up at 5:30 in the morning for some ungodly reason that can pretty much be chalked up to “my body hates me”. I’ll be back after I’ve written all the words.