Happy Saturday Sunday, squiders! I’m having a great day, and I hope you are too! (My Saturday ended up being so great, I never finished the blog post.)
Now that we’re actively submitting, we can go back to the revision for my scifi horror novella.
So, of course, my brain is off on every possible tangent unrelated to said novella.
For example, several years ago I wrote a YA horror novel called What Lurks Beneath the Bleachers. It started as a joint epistolary novel I was writing with my friend Kate, each of us writing letters as a separate viewpoint character. Kate wandered off in the middle of it, and I eventually (with her blessing) rewrote the whole thing myself, keeping a letter at the beginning of each chapter.
I later went back and rewrote it, and I ran it through the critique marathon once (where it got shredded) and have not touched it since.
But it does live rent free in my head, and I would like to get back to it at some point. I wrote one of the main characters, Ali, in another joint novel that I wrote with a different friend, and I have a third book partially outlined that would take place after Bleachers.
So every now and then my brain will randomly start listing the things that need to be fixed:
- Technology has to be added in (I started it long enough ago that not every teenager had a cell phone)
- Tone needs to be evened out (some chapters are funny, some are scary, but it flip flops and not helpfully)
- Removal of the letters? (arguably the core of the story, but do kids even write letters anymore?)
- Go to single viewpoint? (might fix tone flipflop)
All lovely thoughts, although not currently relevant.
(Although, since I’m trying not to add more revision projects onto my plate, if I change enough things, it may actually count as a new story in my head?)
(No, bad Kit. Focus.)
Another story that I would like to get back to someday is called Broken Mirrors, which is and always has been an awful title. This was the first book I ever revised, and I actually queried it for a bit. It’s fairy tale satire about a witch and a princess who are best friends. Like Bleachers, it suffers from tone issues. I wrote it to be YA (the characters are 15 and 16) but tonally it reads more like MG because of the fairy tale silliness.
So, again, my brain randomly decides that This Too Needs Fixing instead of focusing on whatever I’m actually working on.
Except unlike Bleachers which has some obvious fixes (if it’s horror make it horror, you ditz), Mirrors has yet to solidify one direction or the other. Do I make it MG to keep the sillier aspects of the story? (YA is not allowed to be silly. I don’t know why.) Do I make it more serious to make it more YA? If I go MG, do I actually know how to write MG?
(It basically breaks down to how tied am I to Aunt Gertrude living in a gingerbread house in the middle of the forest vs. how invested am I in the romance subplot.)
(Jury’s out.)
But it doesn’t actually matter, because neither Bleachers nor Mirrors are on the immediate schedule of writing projects. First we do the scifi horror novella, then we work on the paranormal cozy mystery, somewhere in there we write something new, and THEN we can look at other things.
Unless, you know, I get an agent and need to work on Book 1 edits, and go on sub, and all that jazz. And then I assume I move directly onto Books 2 and 3. Who knows! Chaos.
Maybe I should throw the schedule out and put all potential projects in a hat, and draw one out. Screw schedules! Schedules are for nerds!
Part of me wonders if there’s some deeper psychological thing going on, like deep down I’m frustrated that the scifi horror needs more work than I initially thought, or I’m worried I won’t be able to fix it, or something.
Maybe I’m just not in the mood to write horror.
Who knows! Not me!
But if I am going to move on to something else, now might be the time to do it, while I’m still not too far into the revision.
I may ponder that, actually.
Good talk, everyone. See you on Tuesday (or maybe Wednesday)!
