Newsletter of Christmas Present
Oh, hey there.
Still figuring out the whole newsletter thing. Welcome to our... did we ever figure out what to call these? Issues? Volumes? I’m just going to say the December newsletter.
Thanks for following along on this journey of discovery.
So, what’s the state of things? Well, last time I mentioned I was about halfway through the second draft of this new project-- actually, let’s call it GJD, just so I don’t have to type out “the new project” again and again. Anyway, last month I was about halfway through the second draft and now I’m...
Well, about halfway through the second draft. Probably wiggled up against the halfway point while you were reading this.
Hang on! There’s a good reason. And it’s not that I’ve been lazy. For once.
If you ever followed my ranty writing blog you’ve probably seen me discuss my drafting process once or thrice (normally I’d throw a link in here, but I’m not going to. More on that down below). My first drafts tend to be messy things. They’re really overwritten in some places, while other sections have notes to future me like <ASK MARY HOW THIS WOULD WORK> or <MAKE THIS NOT SUCK AS MUCH>. I’d rather keep writing than get bogged down too much, especially since I know I’m going to get another pass.
Which brings us to the second draft. This is where things get tightened up, I look up those details, ask smarter people about that thing, and try to, y’know, make it not suck as much. For GJD, this meant rewriting quite a bit of the first two-fifths of the book. A couple things that had seemed like good ideas were looking, well, not as good once they were actually written out. I rewrote a couple chapters, added three chapters almost from scratch, and restructured a whole mystery aspect that... well, to be honest, ended up looking really stupid once it was all set out on the page.
And I’m sure a few folks are reading that and thinking “Wow, I guess someone’s never heard of an outline.” To which I say, the outline for GJD is thirty pages long. But while it’s real easy to say “Bob goes into the cave” in an outline, once you’re writing you come to realize Bob’s a bit more of a coward. Or maybe Sadie’s ended up being just as brave as Bob now that you’ve expanded her character a little more, so now you need a reason for her not to go in the cave. And these little changes knock over dominoes and suddenly Bob’s character arc makes no sense. Which is also probably why its conclusion felt a little flat in the first draft.
Sometimes this stuff is easy to spot in an outline and tweak then and there. Other times it’s not. And this is a big book with a lot of characters all doing their own thing. Some of them have been spot on what I thought they’d be from the very start. And others haven’t.
So the reason I’m still about halfway through the book is because the book’s about thirty-five pages longer than it was last month, and there’s another seventy or eighty pages that have changed a lot since then.
In other news, it’s been years in the making but I’m getting my website redone and having a lot of stuff all pulled under one umbrella. The ranty writing blog’s getting pulled over there. Lists of books. Social media stuff. The FAQ. All of it in one place. Finally.
Other than that...
Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching-- Andor, The Peripheral, Wednesday, ST: Prodigy, Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas special
Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading-- Hate Machine (Stephen Blackmoore). Transformers: Last Bot Standing (Nick Roche & E.J. Su). About to start The Violence (Delilah Dawson)
Cool New Toys-- Mr. Knight (from Moon Knight). A bunch of Morphonauts 4” figures. Galactus, again, because he’s so huge he warrants mention in two newsletters
Hope the holidays are fantastic for all of you. Talk to you again next year.