In November 2009 I discovered Nanowrimo – a worldwide writing challenge with one goal – write a complete novel with a minimum of 50,000 words, and so I did. I signed up, I wrote solidly for thirty days, and I completed my novel. I even did a little editing before tucking it inside my hard drive, and then I forgot about it – on purpose.
It was awful.
Not the story. The story was fine, it was the writing. It was all over the place – still is.
I’ve rewritten it twice since then, and with each ‘draft’ more of a story emerged. Fast forward to 2015 and I now face the prospect of editing three books (everyone does a trilogy – right?)
Since ‘pantsing‘ it (writing without plan, plot or reason) I have taken a step back and looked at the story, the way the events and characters interlinked … basically, it grew arms and legs. The more I [re]wrote, the more I learned about the world I’d created. It went beyond the two main characters having a bit of a tiff. Old arguments reared from the words, so did troublesome backstories, conspiracies, and politics – I even destroyed a large part of the planet to make one of the threads work.
Having spent so long fine-tuning the details, the time has come to write it again. My writing style has changed so much over the years, it feels like the right thing to do, plus I managed to lose two years of edits I thought was safely tucked away on a cloud server.
So, that’s me. It’s where I’m up to, and I shall blog my progress as I go because I know you’ve got nothing better to do with your time then read my waffle – right?