Blog – Kit Campbell Books

Productive Procrastination

Happy Friday, squiders. Hope you’ve had a good week!

So, I did end up writing that short story for the submission call, and I submitted it before the deadline (though I have not gotten a confirmation, and they say to email if you don’t get a confirmation after a few days, but that’s for tomorrow). The story was fun and easy to write. Who knows if anything will come of it, but it’s been a while that a short has flowed that easily, so that was nice.

I also looked at the horror story I’d started last fall, decided I really didn’t care, and did not finish it. I also closed the tabs I’d been keeping open to go with it. It may never get done. And that’s okay! Life’s too short for bad short stories.

I did go through a couple of other stories that I’d written a while ago and do some revisions, and this morning I spent some time sending them and another story out to markets. I used to spend a little bit of time every month sending out shorts, but I haven’t really written any lately, and the practice has fallen by the wayside.

I will say, though, that there were considerably less markets than I’m used to for spec fic. Not a surprise, I guess, in this economy, but sad to see.

I also sent out a couple of queries to agents.

All this to say that I still haven’t gotten to revising World’s Edge.

It was on the plan for today, but submission took longer than expected and now I’m out of time. Alas. But now I have hopefully gotten all the weird wiggles out of my system and we can buckle down and get to it.

(May reread the draft again. For Reasons.)

Things do seem to be spirally in general, though. Amazon emailed to say they were raising their printing prices, and I would need to raise my prices as well or else they wouldn’t pay me royalties. (Sigh. I should do that here.)

(Holy crap this is more complicated than expected, they’ve redone the categories as well. Okay, I’m going to have to dedicate some time to this. Later.)

Mailchimp, which I use for my newsletter, emailed to say they were removing features from my level of plan, and wouldn’t I like to go up to a higher plan to retain them? And the answer is no, no, I would not. My newsletter is something I use very fleetingly. I’ve never really gotten the hang of it, and I don’t email enough to retain engagement (God, I think it’s been a year at this point) or have enough news to justify emailing more often.

I was emailing out weird stories I’d found (such as the Bennington Triangle, or ghost words, etc.) but it took time to do research and write everything out and it was a lot of top of everything else. Which is why the schedule got less and less frequent until, indeed, I have now given up.

So I will need to adjust my Mailchimp to get around the loss of said features (which is mostly going to affect my ability to mail out reader magnets) or look at other options or, I don’t know, just light the whole thing on fire, I guess.

(I wonder if there are zines out there that want weird, “true” things that would want those stories? Something for another day.)

A lot of little things like that building up. Sigh.

How are you doing, squider? I hope the economy’s not getting you down. See you next week!

Getting Distracted

Hello, squiders! As you can see, I have survived the children. (I called one poor child the wrong name like three times, and this will haunt me forever.)

I think it went decently! I do like talking about outlining, and the kids were interested in what I had to say, and they asked lots of questions. Afterward, the teacher thanked me as well and said she also learned a lot, so, uh, mission accomplished, I guess. I ended up talking to them/answering questions for like an hour and a half.

(And then, in the weekly email, she wrote about me coming to visit as a highlight of the week, which is also a little embarrassing, but why, right? It was a positive experience for everyone (except maybe the poor kid I called the wrong name) and I should take pride in my writing skills and knowledge but I still get weird about being an author and having other people acknowledge said fact.)

(What is especially awful about calling this kid the wrong name is that my youngest literally went to his birthday party like the week before.)

I have run into a bit of an issue with my revision. I was so excited for it, and I wrote all those side scenes, and the critique meeting went so well…

…but I haven’t actually started the revision.

There’s no reason to not start–everything is in place–but for some reason I’m stuck here.

Could be that I burnt myself out temporarily with the side scenes, and my brain is like, “oh, project done,” instead of realizing that was just, I don’t know. Background info. I write side scenes all the time when writing or revising because it helps me to know how other characters are feeling in certain moments, which helps me make them feel more real even when they’re not viewpoint characters, and to know how things that are happening off-screen are going down. But I don’t tend to write a bunch at a time, and I did make a list and work through it, so it’s possible my brain got a little crosswired.

Whatever the reason, we seem to be off on a horror short story side quest. I started a horror story in, oh, August, I want to say? But I never finished it because I wasn’t really getting anywhere, and I realized I was procrastinating my submission materials and needed to focus on that.

And I found this submission call yesterday for a found fiction zine that actually solidified an idea I’ve been vaguely playing with for the past year and a half (of course the submission window closes in TWO DAYS but I can probably make that if I, you know, focus).

But, of course, I should work on my revision.

But maybe I’ll take this week off, write these two short stories, and refocus next week, once my brain is hopefully back on track. I can at least start a new draft document now, and maybe that will help the ol’ muse realize that it’s not done with this project and we’d better get on it.

The critique marathon traditionally starts the first week of June, which is also when my next in-person critique meeting is, so I have a little bit of time. Plus my writing retreat is the last weekend of this month, so that should help me get into the meat of things as well.

(And I wrote the rest of this last night but never actually finished it. Good job, me. But I have at least made a revision document now.)

Part of the issues with May is that school is ending, and so we have year-end everything, and separate things for both kids and everything is awful. Everyone’s schedules are wonky and so they are grumpy. And I find myself procrastinating with mindless things more than usual.

Ah well.

How are you doing? Getting to do the things you want to do? Brain cooperating?

Help, I’ve Been Asked to Talk to Children

Hidey-ho, squiders. Happy Thursday. I wrote 7K over the last week on side scenes (and also rewriting the climax, which still isn’t quite working, but it is better–but also I don’t tend to revise out of order and probably when I get there chronologically I’ll be more on top of the emotional arcs) which is helpful but not really, you know? Productive procrastination.

(Also, I daydreamed all of said side scenes and once again, writing them down made them infinitely worse. Why can’t you just pour things out of your brain onto the page?)

I did do a paper edit on the first three chapters as well. Chapter 1 needs to be rewritten just cuz it’s old and I can see several mistakes that I probably still make but at least know I shouldn’t be doing at this point. Chapters 2 and 3 are pretty solid, actually, so I don’t think I need to do a lot there except for fixing some continuity things.

But the big news of the week is that my youngest’s teacher has asked me to come in and talk to the kids about writing. Sounds like outlining specifically (they’re doing their fantasy writing unit! which I am thrilled is a unit) though I am waiting on answers to a few questions.

When I went to the writing retreat last year (and it’s coming up at the end of the month! I can’t believe it’s already been a year) I told myself I needed to have more confidence, say yes to more opportunities. (I haven’t seen Giuseppe in a hot minute, though–wonder where he went)

So I have said yes to talking to the class about outlining or whatever but I am freaking out about it just a tad.

(Okay, a lot.)

I mean, I’ve done panels at conventions and I teach SkillShare classes. In general, I love talking about writing! Something about it beings kids is making it weird, which makes zero sense because 1) I am a Cub Scout leader, I teach kids stuff all the time, and 2) kids are probably a lot less judge-y than adults, and they’ll less likely to be able to tell if I am full of crap (I am not).

(Currently.)

Anyway, that’s tomorrow morning. I’ve asked my youngest a few questions about what they have covered (“Do you know what an inciting incident is?” “A what?” “How about 3-act structure?” *blank stare*) so I do have a bit of a baseline, and she drew me out the plot progression they’ve learned (which is your standard rising action to climax) so I know where they’re starting from.

So we’ll see how this goes.

Wish me luck, I guess!

Distracted by the Very Thing I’m Supposed to be Working On

Howdy, squiders! I wish I could say I took a well-deserved and organized break while I waited for my critique group, but really I got nothing done at all, so alas.

Oh well. On we traipse, through the mud.

But my critique group liked the beginning! Even with the very old writing. My hope is over the next day or so to go through and start the revision, though the final member of the group did say they’d send me some notes even though they missed the meeting, and I kind of want to wait until I get that, for completeness.

But really she’s got ’til Thursday morning and then I’m going to do it anyway.

Mostly what I’ve done over the past few days is daydream about the book. Which, on one hand, is good! It means me and the story are vibing, which will make the revision easier, and it means the story is staying with me when I’m not working on it, so my brain is problem-solving in the background while I do other things.

When I’m working on a story and I can’t get lost in it in my own head, the going tends to be much slower, and often the end product isn’t as good either. They’re not bad, they’re just not inspired.

I am aware this is one of those weird creativity things and that, in general, I talk a lot of talk about process and working on stuff instead of waiting for lightning to strike and all that jazz that goes directly against this.

(Not that the two aren’t compatible. You absolutely should create even when the creating is hard, just to stay in the habit, so you can reach your goals. But when the lightning is striking is pretty awesome too.)

The bad thing about getting lost in the story in my own head, is that I’m lost in the story in my own head. I’ll plan out whole scenes from multiple angles and play out different ways to go about doing it, but then it’s hard to sit down and write the scene out because, of course, it’s never as good on paper as it was in my brain. Or I’ve played it out so many ways I forget bits when I get around to writing it.

I also tend to go back and re-read existing parts a lot. On one hand, again, good, because it gets more of the story details into my head, which makes it easier to carry threads throughout, and make callbacks later, and get more of those “Ah-HA” moments for readers.

On the other hand, I spend a lot of time re-reading. Especially my favorite parts. And this can get into a re-read/daydream/re-read cycle that often lasts a week or so.

In the great scheme of things, though, it’s still not too bad. This book is about 90K right now and is unlikely to get significantly longer, even with the scenes I’m thinking of expanding or changing. Definitely not going to top 100K.

When I get into this mode on, say, the Trilogy, sometimes it gets to the point where I’m reading all three books, all of which are 100K+. I can 90K in a matter of hours, but it takes me a few days to get through all three Trilogy books.

These are things I know about myself and my process. Are they essential to the final product? Who knows?

But I do take them as good signs. If I’m not obsessing about my own story, why should anyone else?

And experience tells me I will calm down, and get moving, and everything will be fine (though experience also says I might get stuck in this process a few more times through the revision, including: any time I’ve taken a break, right before a difficult scene, near the end, randomly, and if I get really excited about something).

Oh well.

How are you doing, squiders? Anything fun happening on your front?

Weigh Anchor

Hello, squiders!

Well, I’ve made it through the draft (again). I have made my maps, and they might actually be good. Well, they’ll at least be useful. (I do need to at least clean up the upper hold on the ship map, where I tried a couple of different combinations of rooms based off of in-book descriptions until I found one that made the most sense.)

(Also I moved a couple cities around on my continent map til I found places I liked them.)

(Also I discovered that the captain’s quarters moves decks kind of willy nilly throughout the draft, so definitely need to fix that.)

I’ve also made my chapter list, with notes about changes that need to be made, so I feel pretty good about getting going on the actual revision now. (Though I did a partial readthrough today, and noted a problem with how much supplies they had varying wildly, so I need to add that to my list.)

ANYWAY.

My in-person critique group is meeting on Sunday, like I told you guys last week, and I decided it wasn’t worth it to try and stuff a major revision in before then, so I’ve sent them the first draft of the first three chapters. I did do some minor editing–couple of typo fixes, a couple of continuity issues I’d noted that were easy fixes. But the hope is that we can see if the characters and plot are at least working before I re-write them and fix the old writing.

(The first chapter is from, oh, 2014 or something. I had these two characters and a basic storyline forever and ever and they were never gelling into an actual story, so I actually took them and used them for Hidden Worlds, assuming they never would gel. Fast forward five years after HW was published, and my brain was like, “Oh, what if we move the story into the same world as the Trilogy?” and BAM the whole thing gelled and that is the basis for World’s Edge.)

(Super annoying.)

(Anyway, when the story gelled, I made a whole bunch of notes and wrote the first chapter, and then went back to whatever project I was working on at the time. The rest of the book was written over 2019-2021. I think I told you guys that last week too.)

I did save some quotes I liked as I was reading through the draft. Who knows if they shall survive the revision, but here some of them are, in no particular order and with no context.

“I’m gonna set him on fire someday,” she confided. “But not on the ship, because that would be bad.”

Viri retrieved the other shovel, handing it to Marit, then shoved the remaining sword into her belt. “Happy exploring! Here’s to hoping there’s no death crabs.”

“No,” Ead said, his hands moving deftly as he worked. “When they don’t hurt, they itch. The itching may be worse. Oh, and it’s entirely possible we’re all going to die in a few hours, so that’s comforting.”

I do find myself in a bit of a conundrum though. Probably not worth it to start the revision until I get the feedback from my critique group, in case they point out something major. No reason to do it twice, amirite?

So what do I do until then?

I started a Victorian horror story back six months or so that I never finished. I should finish that, if only so I can close a couple of reference tabs I have open. I’ve been scribbling down short story ideas in a notebook lately, and in theory I’m doing a bingo challenge in one of my online writing communities, though I haven’t written anything for that.

Or I could take a few days off and read and draw and play video games. That’s tempting.

Probably should make a decision, but it’s getting late and maybe we’ll see how we feel in the morning.

How are you doing, squider? Up to anything interesting?

I Have Survived

Happy…uh, Wednesday, squiders! I have survived the second weekend of the leadership training I was helping lead (though there were many tears, and I’ve picked up some sort of respiratory illness). I will still need to help and guide my team over the next 18 months as they work through their projects, but that’s practically nothing at this point.

And, so, I am free to get back to my revision! (And submitting queries, which I admittedly haven’t done at all this month) Except I am so tired that I just want to sleep for a week straight. BUT unfortunately you’re not allowed to do that, so on we go.

I did my themes and arcs on Monday, and yesterday I started the readthrough/chapter list, although I’ve just remembered I was going to make notes on problems and I forgot to do that too. Well, good news, I’m only two chapters in, so I can catch back up on that pretty quick.

This morning I started the map of the Hope’s Redemption based off a note in chapter two about where the hammocks are, but have found a bit of an issue in that I’m not sure how exactly to put it on the map, because I know there’s two or three hammock areas, and also the medbay and galley are on this deck, as well as an open area for eating. Maybe I need to just make notes until I have enough information to lay things out.

(But this does show that this was a good idea, and eventually if I run into areas where I’m contradicting myself, then decisions can be made and everything can be streamlined.)

Chapter wise, again, only through Chapter Two. Chapter one needs a complete rewrite. I wrote it in 2014 so I wouldn’t forget it and then promptly went off and did other things for five years before I wrote the rest of the draft in 2019-2021 (I couldn’t really write fiction in 2020, which is why the draft took so long), and man, does it show. I was still doing the double spaces between sentences!

I mean, like, the general content of the chapter is fine. A little out of character for some people, but easily remedied. There’s a line in my conlanged language that I think needs to come out, because of language drift and blah blah blah.

(Basically, I conlanged some of my language for the Trilogy–but not a lot because I find conlanging VERY difficult. However, this story takes place 700 years before the Trilogy, and at this point there’s two separate dialects that will become separate languages by the time the Trilogy events roll around. So ideally I would drift back 1000 years to create a common ancestral language, and then go forward 300 years on this other dialect and good god I sometimes forget where my phone is when I’m holding it, I’m not Tolkien, I’m not cut out for this.)

ANYWAY

Chapter two feels pretty solid as is.

I would like to finish my chapter list/maps/problem list before I start changing things (in case I need to add in correlations or anything) BUT I do need to get stuff to the critique group to read by, like, the 20th, which I’m realizing is only four-ish days away. So I may need to fudge that estimate a bit, or else put my nose to the grindstone and stop playing phone games.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

See you probably next week, squiders, unless I am wildly productive and have something to tell you about on Friday. Ta!

Hooray for Emotional Trauma

Happy Tuesday, squiders! It’s still been hard to move out of the mindset of the leadership training and move on to other things, but I have started rolling on the revision for World’s Edge.

I spent some time on Saturday looking at the problems I’d identified from my initial readthrough (which I think I went over here, but let me know if not) and thinking about how to fix them.

The fixes boiled down to:

Maps – for my own edification and to make sure worldbuilding is consistent. Specifically a map of the Hope and all three of its decks, the path the Hope takes from Altruia across the ocean (including all islands and major magical storm), and the path Rae and Sol/Ead/Marit take on land once they get to the other side. Also considering making Rae’s map, which is the ancient one she’s using for navigation. So I know what she’s working off of. Oh, and Altruia. Altruia has a lot more forest in this time period (compared to the Trilogy time period) and the Republic hasn’t formed yet, so it will be good to know where the humans are concentrated at this point of time.
Emotional arcs – the bare bones are there but they could use some expansion. Marit, who is our viewpoint character, has just gone through a pretty traumatic time before the start of the story, and her internal arc needs to follow the fallout of said trauma and as she heals from it. In addition, Rae (who is the protagonist character) and Sol also have traumatic pasts that they’re dealing with that are essential to the main plot. I bought the The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma book, which is from the Emotion Thesaurus people (a lovely resource), and read through their explanation of emotional trauma at the beginning, which was very helpful.
Clear outline of plot, subplots, arcs, and major plot points – Once I know my emotional arcs I can finalize my plots and all that jazz. Also going to do a couple of the target exercises from Holly Lisle’s (may she rest in peace) revision classes, such as the ones about theme.
Chapter list with emphasis on plots/subplots – I made one of these for Book 1, looking at each chapter and what it currently entailed (and where, if anywhere, it was in terms of the three major subplots), and then made notes on changes. It was super helpful, and I’m going to try it again.

And then I broke those all down into steps and made a schedule. We have a critique meeting at the end of the month and I’d like to have the first two chapters ready to go for that, but we will see. I will be gone all weekend (Thurs-Sun) for the second half of the leadership training and I do need to pack and finish making my staff presents (30 of them, and I’m at 23), plus normal life responsibilities and all that jazz.

Yesterday I spent time working on the emotional arcs. I went through the Emotional Wound thesaurus and also looked at the Needs Pyramid (which the book references, and is actually a really logical way at looking at emotional arcs), and then wrote out Marit’s, Rae’s, and Sol’s specific traumas (and wrote out Marit’s arc. Rae/Sol have smaller arcs because they’ve been dealing with their crap for a lot longer and have all their delusions/coping mechanisms firmly in place). And then, because I was on a roll, I did Ead and Viri too, to a lesser degree.

(Character introduction in case you don’t remember who people are)

Next step is to do the target exercises for theme and overall plot, and then write out the tentpoles for all the plots, subplots, arcs, and assorted sundry.

And THEN I’m going to read back through the manuscript, make the chapter list (and notes), and work on the maps as makes sense. Altruia and potentially Rae’s map I can do before the readthrough, but the path map and the ship map and all that makes sense to work on as we go through the story, so we can build off what exists (and make changes as necessary).

From there I can start the actual revision, unless this process exposes something else that needs changing and then we’ll need to fix that too.

If I don’t get through the prep work in time to send stuff to the critique group, well, I can still do a surface level clean-up and send it out, and then makes their suggested changes when I go back through.

Anyway, I’m excited! I really enjoy this story and I’m looking forward to making it even better than it is now.

NaNoWriMo is No More (NaNoWriMoNoMo)

Howdy, squiders. I have survived the first weekend of my leadership training, and I got everything ready and dropped off at the consignment sale. Phew. Of course, now I need to get back into everything I neglected while I was working on those…

There’s still a second weekend for the leadership training (not this weekend, but next) but my personal contributions are much less, so I’m not too worried about it.

Of course, getting out of that mindset and into the mindset where I can think about literally anything else has been…difficult. But we’re working on it.

The big news this week is that Nano is officially dead. It’s not a surprise, and I find myself not terribly torn up about it, but I think that’s because I already mourned it when the child grooming allegations and the terrible way that was handled came to light. I will miss it. It really helped me get started in my adult writing and provided me with the knowledge that I could write a novel, and it’s provided many friends along the way.

(I actually downloaded all my stats off the site a few months ago, when rumors of shutdown began to swirl. TrackBear provided a handy link to transfer all the data over.)

The organization changed a bunch between when I first did it in 2003 and when I last did it in 2023. I think there were…5000 of us? And you absolutely could keep up with the whole forum and know people from all over.

I participated in the first Script Frenzy. (The only time I did.) The first Night of Writing Dangerously. (Where I consumed my first Redbull and promptly disassociated, and didn’t touch one again until about two months ago.)

(I can tell exactly where in that draft that kicked in.)

I used to mentor Nano newbies and help mail out gear from Nano HQ, which at the time was a tiny little place up in Oakland. I knew Chris Baty and sometimes he remembered my name.

After the first few years that I won, I started to try something new every year. New genres. New viewpoints. Different story structures. If we were going to wildly write 50000 words in a month we might as well try something interesting and see how we liked it.

I found other writing communities through Nano, most notably the Spork Room, which started as a thread on the Nano boards before it spun off into its own forums. But also WriYe, and April Fool’s (defunct for many years now), and a handful of others here and there.

As I’ve mentioned before, starting in 2013 I didn’t participate every year, and it became less relevant to my own writing over time. It felt like the event became less accessible over time as well–too big, too unwieldy, and after the last website redesign, the forums were basically unusable and the buddy system that had been in place for years was essentially destroyed. It kind of feels like it never really recovered after that (2019), and nothing but bad decision after bad decision followed that.

I do wonder where we will go from here. Writing challenges have been around forever, but none of them have ever had the momentum Nano had. The amount of people participating made it a real event, one people looked forward to each year, planning months in advance. One that existed online and in person, and had the creativity energy to sweep you up and drag you along.

I don’t know that anything can replace it. Maybe nothing should.

But I do remember finishing my first complete draft. How proud I was. How much confidence it gave me. A lot of that draft was written during Nano 2004, and who knows how long it would have taken me otherwise if left to my own devices.

Other people deserve to have that feeling.

Who knows. Maybe something else will come along. But I don’t think it will be one of the other things clamoring to be the “next Nanowrimo.” There’s too many trying, not enough momentum behind any of them.

What do you think, squiders? Are you a writer, and did you do Nano? Have you seen any glimpses of something new?

Too Easy

Afternoon, squiders. How’s your week been?

So like we talked about last week, I hunted down World’s Edge, and I read it this week over a couple of days. (It’s about 100K.)

I actually really enjoyed it.

But I got to the end and was like, well, this is really good! I’m not sure it needs a lot of revision work.

Which is bull, I’m sure. It’s got to be, right? No one writes a perfect first draft.

I mean, it’s not perfect. The sailing terminology is haphazard (sometimes the viewpoint character will call something by the correct name and then explain it/learn about it later). There’s a ton of typos, so I wrote certain bits really quickly. The internal arc for said viewpoint character definitely needs some work, and the ending is rushed and poorly described, and it needs to tie into said internal arc better.

But in general, it’s really solid. Aside from the above, I’m not seeing anything terribly obvious that needs to be added in (though there is a conversation that I wrote as a drabble that is referenced a few time, and that needs to just go in the book itself).

Now, it is said that you write the first draft for yourself, and the second draft for your readers. The first draft is definitely working for me, and it’s entirely possible that I’m missing something that I’m not seeing.

So where do I go through here? Do I do my in-depth revision planning with the hopes that it ferrets out things that aren’t working (and not that I’m wasting my time)? Do I do a lighter version of the prep and focus on the things I saw as being wrong? Do I do a superficial edit to fix wording and typos and throw it at my critique group to see if they point out bigger picture issues I’m missing?

I’m not sure yet. And I won’t really have a chance to think too hard about it until the first week of April, after the first weekend of my leadership course and the drop-off for the consignment sale is done. Until then I’ve got to focus on getting those done (and not freaking out in the meantime).

What do you think, squiders? What would you do in my place?

Hope you’re having a lovely March!

Pondering Accomplished

Good evening, squiders! How are you doing?

I’m a little overwhelmed around normal everyday things and this leadership course I’m staffing at the end of the month, and the consignment sale. (I think I’ve talked about both of those before. Let me know if not.)

Last week I noted that now that I’m submitting Book 1 to agents (I got my first rejection this morning) I could go back to my revision, but that my brain was thinking about other stories instead. And through talking through that with you guys, I realized that maybe that particular revision (the scifi horror novella) is not the right revision to be working on at the moment.

I have spent some time looking at all my projects (mostly revision, some new stories vaguely outlined) and pondering things, and I have come to the following conclusions:

1) If I am querying a YA fantasy, it makes sense to work on another YA fantasy. If an agent calls to make an offer, or to see if we’re a good fit long term, and they ask what I’m working on, and I have changed both age range and genre, that could be a turnoff for them. I noticed that many of the agents I put on my querying list were asking for YA fantasy but not necessarily science fiction or horror, and if they wanted YA fantasy, they didn’t necessarily want adult fantasy either. (Not everyone, obviously, but enough.)

2) I write a lot of first drafts, and then I put the story away to eventually get to in my revision cycle. This has perhaps hurt me in the long run because I have a lot of stories that need revision and I will probably never get to all of them. (And maybe some of those older ones should be forgotten anyway.)

3) A lot of my existing stories could be rewritten (or if not yet written, modified) to be YA, so that’s good. Probably.

So what have I decided?

Of my existing revision projects, only two are YA fantasy: Broken Mirrors, which we talked about last week (the one that is straddling the line between MG and YA and doing neither successfully), and World’s Edge, which you can find here on the blog, since I wrote it for Nano in 2019. World’s Edge takes place in the same world as the trilogy (just 700 years before) as well. World’s Edge is borderline YA, as it was also an experiment. I wanted to write a story where the viewpoint character is not the protagonist. So the main character is 16, but the character driving the story is an adult. A little fiddly, for sure.

Of those two options, World’s Edge seems like the right choice, as it’s the right genre(-ish) and the same world as the book I’m querying, and Broken Mirrors is a disaster.

That said, I have no idea what state World’s Edge is in. I finished the draft in 2020, I think, and haven’t looked at it since. (A common issue, unfortunately. I have gotten better about going all the way through the process, but not all the time.) It could be a mess, or need a lot of work.

So the general plan is to read over World’s Edge and see what state it’s in, and then make a determination about whether it’s a good project to start now. And perhaps we look at writing a new project if it’s a mess. Something age and genre appropriate.

On we blindly stumble! See you next week!

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Books by Kit Campbell