The main difference between the alpha draft I circulated in May 2015 and the beta draft of February 2016: last summer, everyone agreed what the problems were. This year, readers had vastly different opinions.
This is scintillating -- it means the book has moved beyond objective reproach and into subjective reproach (ha!). I feel an extraordinary sense of gratitude and pride to have such thoughtful and articulate folks as readers. I also feel maybe 15% mortified that people read my slop. But that's a decrease from the 90% I felt with the alpha!
I've spent most of the last month and a half huddled up with my plot, trying to make it conform to a more traditional story structure as a broad-strokes way of resolving major pacing issues. Overall, I think it's working, and I'm happy with the refocusing of the story on Sierra's inner battle, versus her external conflict/quest. But a few babies, some more loved than others, have fallen to the knife along the way: there's no more "Rocky training montage"; there's much less dreaminess; two distinct locations are being combined, probably less than gracefully, into one.
I took a bugfiling approach to triaging people's feedback: was this issue far-ranging, something that deeply affected the structural integrity of the work, rotting the beams of the house -- in Google parlance, a P1S1? Or was it a factual error, a stylistic preference, something easily corrected with a layer of paint? In fact, the house metaphor, and the painting metaphor, have come up quite a bit. When I started this, I had no idea what I was doing besides this ineffable task of "writing a novel," but in retrospect, it's just like any other creative work: if you're smart, you don't immediately start dickering with tiny details, but you start with a sketch, a prototype, base colors, rough shapes -- and iterate, iterate, iterate.
What do you want to know about the process of writing a novel? How can I best serve you with the short time I have in your inbox? Let me know by hitting reply.
Yours,
Amy