Well, Squiders, I have finally finished my chainsaw edit of my YA paranormal/dark fantasy novel. It ended up being approximately 90,000 words, which makes it 15,000 words longer than the original draft. Most of the new stuff is related to character arcs and some fleshing out of the main plot, but mostly character arcs.
I’ve got it out to a couple of readers, so we’ll see if it’s better, or just different. I found it really hard to tell. I went back to the edit after Nano, and read through what I had thus far (about 65K at that point), and I honestly couldn’t tell, which is really weird for me. So hopefully my readers can tell me what’s what. I don’t think either of them read the original draft, so it should be interesting to get their opinions.
I also finished the first of my nonfiction books and have that out to a couple of people to read. Feedback thus far has been very positive, so hooray!
Since I’m done with my chainsaw edit (a month and a half after I wanted to be), I can go back to writing my space adventure series (with space dinosaurs!) that I started in November. If you remember, I was trying out a couple of different structural changes from my normal novel-writing process.
I’m pleased to say that I think the changes are for the better–I rather enjoyed my readthrough of what I previously had, and the new outlining process (outlining by beats rather than phase outlining) leaves me lots of room to play around with things without affecting my main plotlines or character arcs.
It’s been a little slow getting back into the flow of writing it, but I am generally optimistic about the whole project. Turns out you can’t go wrong with space dinosaurs.
Been up to anything interesting yourselves, Squiders?
