Summer is coming to an end, and autumn is beginning to show itself in the golden crisping of the leaves and the cool fog in the early morning. Of course, its Appalachia, which means it still ends up being in the high 80s by midday and the humidity is thick enough I’m surprised I don’t see goldfish swimming by in the air. But, as the seasons begin to change, I thought it would be a good time to check in.
My last post was back in March, when I made an announcement that I had finished Zero Draft of The ReReWrite of the Damned. I had planned to let the door-stopper sit for a month, then dive into edits and to make it into a publishable book ready for an October release.
That obviously did not happen.
First, Taterhead (not his real name, but it fits him) had to have surgery on his leg, and what should have been a sedate couple of weeks with him lounging on the couch wearing a Cone of Shame ended up as a two month odyssey into a Marx Brothers’ level fiasco that involved multiple trips back to the vet to get his stitches replaced, a regimen of calm-down drugs that had no effect on him whatsoever, and finally confinement to a cage to keep the little shithead from having to have his stitches put back in for the fifth time.
Idiot Boy in Idiot Jail
We also had to make him a pair of assless chaps out of a tube sock to cover his stitches, putting my arts and crafts skills to good use. Yes, there are pictures.
It’s called Fashion, Sweetie. Look it up.
I had no idea a small dog could be this much of a handful. He is perfectly fine now, other than having a bald spot on his leg, but it was two months of round the clock care to make sure he didn’t hurt himself or rip out his stitches again. He’s part Jack Russell, and also part pit bull, so you have all the hyperactivity and frantic energy of the Russell combined with the cinder block-headed stubbornness of a pittie. Did I mention he’s 9 years old? I could not imagine going through this with him as a puppy.
It was an adventure, is what I’m saying.
So that took up two months, and a while to recover from, so my plans to begin editing in the spring fell by the wayside. Summer has a way of getting away from me with various household chores and other things that have to be done while the weather is good, so that finds me on the cusp of Autumn, a season of changes, finally getting into the nitty gritty of pulling Zero Draft into good working order.
I started working on The ReReWrite of the Damned in 2014. It was a reworking of a story I’ve been noodling with off and on for years. I actually started working on the idea when I was 13, back in the heady heydays of the early 90s. Over the years, I’d gone in a dozen different directions with it, changing plots, characters, names, you name it, until I finally got my feet under me and had more or less a plan with where I wanted it to go.
Only to figure out about halfway through that I was going to have to break the book in half, and make it into two books, to avoid having a 700,000 word monstrosity. That meant going back into the book, and figuring out what to keep versus what to cut for the next book. It also meant reworking the antagonist, and eventually realizing that I had been writing the wrong antagonist all along.
Villains, am I right? You can count on them to screw you over every way they can.
But finding this out gave me a clear through-line for the series, and helped me figure out exactly what I was trying to do with it. I already knew it was an urban fantasy series, and planned for it to be roughly 5 to 7 books, with some wiggle room if I needed it. And breaking it into two books would give the plot more room to breath and expand. I tend to get in a hurry and get ahead of myself when I write, which inevitably ends up with me freezing up because I’m trying to do too much too fast. The ADHD is strong in me.
Now that I’m editing, I still have a lot to do to make it a publish-worthy read. I need to cut about 100,000 words out of it, for one thing. I’m an unashamed over-writer, and I sometimes call my Zero Draft a ‘puke-draft.’ I barf everything I want to say all over the page, more or less stream-of-conscious style, and then I have to go back and make it pretty and coherent. If I try to do this in my head while I’m writing, I end up choking my ideas and nothing comes out. Nothing worth reading, anyway. It’s easier for me to pare the words down when I’m finished versus having to make more when I’m done.
That is also why no one sees my rough drafts.
I’m also working on the second book in the series, and have almost half of its Zero Draft completed. I need to go back and rework the beginning, and fix that whole villain situation, but I’m optimistic that this one won’t cause me nearly the headaches the first book has. (Hahaha, the Gods of Writing are laughing at me right now.)
I’ll close out by saying seasons change, and like the seasons, life changes too. No matter how rough things get, they will change in time. That goes for living, and for creative endeavors as well. I’m still trying to teach myself to accept that the work ebbs and flows, that there are full times and fallow ones, but it’s hard for me sometimes. I was brought up in that constant go-go-go where you have to push through no matter what, but that isn’t the way creativity works, and trying to make it do something it can’t or doesn’t want to do often ends up in more frustration than anything else. So again, I’m learning to listen to the changing of the seasons in my mind, to learn when to rest and lay fallow so I can return in the spring and bring the bounty that was always there, under the snow.