Unfinished BLOOD WILL TELL COVER art
I have to admit that I’m stuck–for the moment–on BLOOD IS THICKER. Only two chapters from “The End”, too. I’m not happy with the last couple of chapters and a little nervy about making a time jump at this point in the story, even though I’m sure that’s what the story needs and trying to drag through the intervening time would probably feel just like dragging.
I’m filling the time by playing around with the potential cover art for the first book in the series, BLOOD WILL TELL, in case I decide to e-pub it after all. (I’ll know more about that, hopefully, in a couple of weeks.) Here’s what I’ve got so far (obviously only half finished).
I’ll get myself unstuck pretty soon. I have a couple of things to do to get there:
- The latest podcast of Writing Excuses is about finishing your story. I haven’t listened to it, yet, but I think I need to make some time for it.
- I need to remind myself–until I believe it–that this is only a first draft. First drafts don’t have to be perfect. In fact, they’re not supposed to be perfect. That’s what second, third, etc. drafts are for. I can fix it later, but not if I don’t get it down in the first place.
- But, meantime, letting my brain up for a few days to play with something else may not be such a bad idea.
Meredith Mansfield, Author 
The hardest part of writing the rough draft is actually remembering it’s only the rough draft. Been there. Don’t worry. Any moment or day now something seemingly insignificant will light the torch of inspiration and you’ll be off and running again. Best of luck to you!
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Sometimes it flows easily. Sometimes you take a slight wrong turn and things want to grind to a halt. I’m not sure yet about the “wrong turn”. I declined to create another point of view character five chapters from the end. I might rethink that in the second draft. What I have to do soon is just finish getting the story down. But playing with the cover art will hopefully free up my muse.
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Here here on #2. I think that was the biggest thing I learned from doing NaNoWriMo this year, to embrace the attitude of “It’s only first draft. It doesn’t have to be elegant, but it does have to get done or there will never be another draft, let alone a published book.”
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Yes, that’s a tough one to learn the first time. And sometimes hard to remember. I like the rest so much that I think it stalled me when I got to a part that wasn’t working as well.
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