The Dryad Chronicles

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What’s Next on the Writing Front

When you’ve finished your novel, polished it to the best of your ability with the help of your writing group and beta readers, and started researching agents (or querying agents, or your agent is trying to sell it, or you’re waiting for the gears of publishing to churn), what do you do with yourself? The standard advice—and it’s sound—is to start working on something else.

Since my own manuscript has now entered that desk-to-(hopefully)-bookshelf pipeline, what’s next for me? I will definitely be working on something else. The trick, of course, is to figure out what my brain is willing to tackle.

I do have an idea for a sequel to the book I’ve just finished—it is, in fact, closer to the book I first started to write before realizing I needed to start my story somewhere else—but I don’t think I’m quite at the stage where I’m ready to dive into another novel. So what about short stories?

Short stories are hard for me. I’m not practiced at them, and don’t read nearly so many of them as I do novels, so their structure, the timing of the beats and so on, doesn’t come to me as naturally. And while I have a gazillion story seeds cluttering my mind, it’s hard for me at this stage to pull a plot out of the kind of turn of phrase or generalized situation those usually are.

All the more reason for me to work on short stories!

Right now I have two shorts and a flash ready (or mostly ready) to submit. One of the shorts and the flash have been out and back a few times already, but further revision is never off the table. And with writing time to spare, now, I can afford to sit down with some of the other ideas and really see what comes of them.

It’s kind of exciting to have new projects on the horizon without a novel-sized one lurking in the background. I’m hoping that by the end of the year I will both have several stories I’m proud of ready to submit to various markets and to have made my first sale. With a shift in writing focus, who knows what new magic will emerge.

So I’m taking a couple of days to appreciate the end of my kids’ school year and get my bearings—maybe even spend some real time concentrating on the latest language I’ve been learning casually on Duolingo—before leaping back into the creative stream. I can’t wait to see where it takes me!

Long Time No See

Holy cats, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? It’s amazing how fast time gets away from one.

I don’t need to give anyone an explanation for the past ~16 months or so, but it’s been nearly five years since I last posted here. It wasn’t until some 9 months after my previous post that I finally began drafting my current WIP, which I’d been waffling about for about three years before. Since then, I’ve been working (relatively) steadily on this novel, and I am finally at a point where I can send it out to beta readers, in preparation for beginning the querying process.

It’s all thanks to my fabulous writing group that I’ve been able to complete a draft at all. If not for their encouragement (“Just start writing! Then keep writing. Don’t rewrite the first three chapters over and over; you’ve got to get the whole story out first.”), I would’ve kept trying to do perpetual pre-work instead of putting anything on the page.

And for me, words on the page are most important. Even if it’s crap, I do a lot better with editing existing text than with writing fresh. In fact, even when I have to rewrite an entire chapter from the ground up, if I have anchoring text to go around it, it goes more smoothly. I have discovered that, even though I’m a “pantser” at heart, I need structure to thrive.

That’s why having that zero draft down on the page was so vital. With something to work from, I could analyze the structure I’d created and figure out where, and occasionally even why, it wasn’t working. Then I could get to editing. (So. Much. Editing. OMG, so much.) But my writing group always had helpful feedback (it can be truly amazing to see a story from outside one’s own head for the first time—like… of course that doesn’t make sense without this context I haven’t provided!), and every iteration gets stronger.

I’m hoping to get back to blogging here more regularly. If nothing else, it can be a journal for me to look back on as I embark on this journey in hopes of becoming a published novelist. So as inspiration strikes, I’ll pop back in every now and again to share what the process is like for me. Hopefully I’ll have interesting things to say—and sooner than five years from now!

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