Well, The Awakening, the sequel to To Sleep, reached 120K today. And while there are a lot of good scenes and a lot of good words, the connection between them all are thin tendrils of ‘kinda sorta’ and ‘where was I going with this?’. I really like this book but it there’s not an underlying continuing purpose underneath it. I guess the theme is flawed maybe or the plot itself.
I kept writing, thinking maybe perhaps it would come together and some point and I’d know what it was that was missing. But it never has. And when I realized I’d hit 120K (120449, to be exact), I finally admitted there was a problem. So I gave up on saying the end in its current format. I was tempted to just keep going, hoping maybe I’d find it, but there reaches a point (like, 120K words) when it’s time to do something.
So, I did a ‘save as…’ on the original file ‘the awakening 1’ then did it again to save as it’s original file name. That way the original mass of words is saved for posterity. And now I edit before I even finished. I’m going to read it and tame the tangents I kept going off on. I already know several plot lines are going to be cut because, frankly, I was wincing as I wrote them. But I followed along, hoping it would lead somewhere.
I considered setting it aside for a while, letting it settle, but I don’t want to lose the MCs voice. This is why I jumped into it even before To Sleep had sold. Written in first person, it is very very important to maintain the same voice of the character.
It is times like this that I admire (and hero worship) those writers who outline first. While it is not my style, I wish it were.