first drafts | Meredith Mansfield, Author

Posts Tagged ‘first drafts’

Moving On

Posted in writing, tagged fantasy, first drafts, POV, sequels, series, writing on March 7, 2018| Leave a Comment »

So, while BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING is in the hands of beta readers,

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I’m going back to work on the sequel, BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM.

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The first thing to do, naturally, was to read the ten chapters I’d already written just to refresh myself on where I’d left the story. Sometimes, that results in finding problems I hadn’t noticed earlier.

I found a couple of small things I needed to change and several things I need to consider in the next chapters. I don’t normally go back and make changes in the first draft–unless it’s something that will change the story going forward. One of those changes was like that. But it was small and I’ve already taken care of it.

BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM (Book 2) will be a little different than BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING (Book 1).

Book 1 centered tightly on the main character, although a few other characters got the occasional POV chapter–the love interest, the brother/sidekick, the antagonist. One other character got a single POV chapter.

Book 2 starts in a place where the main character can’t carry the action. He’s stuck in a situation where he can’t move forward until certain other things happen–which is one of the reasons I broke the story where I did. There’s a time lapse between books 1 and 2 before those conditions can be met. So, the action is carried mostly by other characters who are not yet, but will become sidekicks, of a sort. Plus POV chapters by two–at least two–other characters one of which is the antagonist. Five primary points of view.

And one of the things I kind of knew when I paused work on Book 2 to go back and make the revisions on Book1 is that I had set up one of those points of view and then was kind of letting it drop until it becomes important again. That won’t work. So I’m going to have to find something to keep this guy on the edges of the story until his moment comes. That will take a little bit of thought.

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Done!

Posted in writing, tagged critiques, fantasy, first drafts, revisons, sequels, series, writing on March 4, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Hip, hip, hooray!

I finished the initial revisions to BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING!

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It’s ready to go out to my critique partners! Woo hoo!

Now for a brief respite and then to plunge back into the first draft of BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM.

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Progress!!

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Whew!

Posted in writing, tagged fantasy, first drafts, revisions, writing on February 25, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Well, I’ve finally finished the section that had to be redone in BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING.

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This wasn’t so much a rewrite as completely scrapping what I had in the last scene of Chapter 30 and the first scene or two of Chapter 31. That section, of course, is now effectively a first draft and will probably need a bit more work in the final revisions. But, it’s better than it was.

Now, of course, I’ll need to smooth over the transition into the next scene, which is not coming from the same starting point as it was. But that shouldn’t be too bad.

Hopefully, this draft won’t need any more major surgery like this. I’d still really like to finish it by the end of next week so I can get it out to my beta readers, but I’m not going to do a sloppy job to achieve that. And I do know I’ve got a couple of chapters right before the climax that are going to need fleshing out.

It doesn’t have to be perfect to go to the beta readers, of course. But it should be at least close.

Well, it takes as long as it takes to get it right.

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Revisions Started

Posted in writing, tagged characterization, fantasy, first drafts, revisions, series, writing on February 7, 2018| Leave a Comment »

I’m writing this blog a little late today . . . well, tonight. But I have a good excuse. I’ve been working on the revisions of BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING.

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I’m only a handful of chapters in so far, but I am loving the changes. Those first few chapters were . . . not rough, exactly. But they were heavy on information. Now, some of that is unavoidable in fantasy. But this wasn’t, shall we say, as artfully done as it could have been. Now it feels much more organic. And, in the process, I think I’ve given a much better characterization of my main character.

Headed back into the editing cave.

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Read-Through

Posted in writing, tagged fantasy, first drafts, revisions, sequels, series, writing on February 4, 2018| Leave a Comment »

I’m about 60% into the initial read-through of the first draft of BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING.

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Making a few minor revisions as I go, but mostly notes on things that I need to change or add.

Here’s what I know so far:

The first chapters are going to need the most work. No surprise there. As a discovery writer, I’m often feeling my way into the story at the beginning. Also, that’s the part that’s going to need the most in terms of bringing out the internal conflict.
I need to bring that conflict forward throughout. But I knew that already.
Some minor geographical changes need to be made. Partly, this is to accommodate what I’ve written in the sequel, but it works better for this story, too. I’ve made one change, but I’ll need a second read-through to make sure everything is consistent. Well, I’ll be re-reading this at least three or four times before it’s published, anyway.
There are, unsurprisingly, things I need to go back and add. That’s normal.
No matter how hard I sometimes struggled to get this first draft out, I really do still love this story. Whew! That’s the most important one.

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Serendipity, Sort Of

Posted in writing, tagged discovery writer, fantasy, first drafts, revisions, sequels, series, short stories, writing on January 31, 2018| Leave a Comment »

I think my subconscious is smarter than me. For two reasons.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a modified discovery writer, so you’d think, perhaps, that I don’t concern myself with story structure. You’d be wrong. Instead of planning–and outlining–a story following the three-act structure or any other, I usually look at the structure of a story I’ve already written to see where it needs to be tweaked.

Now, my current series is a little bit of a departure for me. DUAL MAGICS is a conventional series made up of four books which each tell a story that together make up a larger arc of the entire series.

Dual Magics 1-3 Boxed Set

BECOME . . . BECOME is more one story that has a significant break in time–almost twenty years–and therefore falls naturally into two books . . . sort of.

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And frankly, this made me a little nervous. It’s really hard to keep the first book from ending on a cliff-hanger. And, as a reader, I hate cliff-hangers. They make me feel like my arm is being twisted to force me to buy the next book just to see what happens. And that doesn’t sit well with my Scots-Irish blood even if I would have bought the next book anyway. I’ve worried that without a clear conflict for this book it would be virtually impossible to bring BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING to a satisfying interim resolution. And I worried that without that conflict–apart from the overall arc of the series–the story sort of meandered. And, to tell the truth, that worry was part of the reason this book has taken so long to write.

So, yesterday, as I was starting the read-through of BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING, I tried and experiment. I just looked at the one-eighth marks, where major plot points should happen, to see if there was something there that I could build up into a conflict for this book. And what do you know? It was right there all the time. It’s an interior conflict for my main character, but it’s a separate conflict that ties into the main conflict of the two-book series. I’ll need to add a bit here and there to pull it up into the light. But the main plot points fall pretty close to all the right places. Now, as I continue the read-through, I’ll be making notes on where I need to add a few internal thoughts or a bit of dialog to just bring this conflict up where it can be seen.

Chekov’s Gun. You know, “If there’s a gun over the mantle in the first act, someone has to fire it by the third act.” Or something very like that.

Well, I’d thrown a character into the middle of BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING. He’s a character who made a brief appearance in BECOME: BROTHERS. I didn’t have any particular reason for reusing him. He did provide a minor complication, but . . . just being there, again, and causing that little problem made him important. Like Chekov’s gun. And I thought I’d probably take him out in the revisions for that reason.

Nope. While I was starting the first draft of BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM, wouldn’t you know that same character turned up again. And he’s in a perfect position to set off a major part of the main conflict.

I swear I didn’t plan that. But I’m sure going to use it.

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Finally!

Posted in writing, tagged fantasy, first drafts, revisions, sequels, series, writing on January 28, 2018| Leave a Comment »

I finished that chapter of BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM I’ve been working on.

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Now I can finally close that file for a month or so while I work on revisions to BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING.

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The plan is to get through that in February (hopefully) and get it out to my beta readers in March. Final revisions and polishing edit in April and publish it in May. That’s the plan, but as someone or other said, “No plan ever survives the first encounter with the enemy. So, we’ll see how that works out.

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The Other Stuff

Posted in writing, tagged fantasy, first drafts, Goals, marketing, revisions, sequels, series, short stories, wide distribution, writing on January 24, 2018| Leave a Comment »

I still hope to finish this chapter of BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM soon.

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Probably not today, but hopefully tomorrow so I can move on to the read-through and revisions on BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING.

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But I’ve had some of those other authorly things to take care of this week, too. When I started, last spring, to publish my books more widely than just to Amazon, I used Pronoun as the distributor for the DUAL MAGICS series.

And Pronoun closed down on January 15th. The plan was to start up a newsletter, which I’ve procrastinated on for years, but I really, really need especially to assist in marketing the audiobook version of THE SHAMAN’S CURSE. And then add the subscription link to the back matter of the books before I redistribute them through Draft2Digital.

But, I keep running into things I need to take care of first before I can finish setting up the newsletter. So, two things:

I’m going ahead with the publication through Draft2Digital. I’ll just have to upload a new file when I get everything together–eventually. It’s not that big a deal. I’ve been doing one book a day. By Saturday, I’ll have the series, including the short story “Modgud Gold” republished through Draft2Digital.
I also need to prep a short story to use as a subscriber incentive. The problem there is that I haven’t written very many short stories–I’m just more comfortable writing at novel length. And most of the ones I have written have been published. However, I do have one–“Infected With Magic”, which I haven’t published mainly because it’s the germ that started MAGE STORM (which will be my next epic fantasy after I finish the BECOME series). And it’s probably my best short story. It was good enough to earn an Honorable Mention from Writers of the Future in 2011. But, of course, that means that I need a cover for it, and at least read it through again, and formatting. And all of that before I can try to finish up the setup for the newsletter. Which is partly why I decided to just go ahead and the get the books out wide again.

And, of course, all of that takes time away from the writing.

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Not Yet

Posted in writing, tagged fantasy, first drafts, Point of View, revisions, sequels, series, writing on January 21, 2018| Leave a Comment »

It’s about time to switch back to BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING to start the revision process.

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But not quite yet. I’m going to finish at least the current chapter in BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM, first.

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Actually, that won’t take very long. If the chores don’t take up too much of my day, I should finish today.

The hitch is that I’ve just decided to break what I planned to be one chapter into two. That’s for two reasons:

The chapter is already ten pages long (about as long as I like a chapter to be) and not yet finished.
The now two chapters have slightly different purposes. The first (not actually chapter one, obviously) is where this character is getting his first real impression of who the father he never knew really was. The second is where he demonstrates for the first time that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

So, there’s a decision to be made. Stop after I finish this chapter and start the revisions on BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING or stay with the momentum and write the next chapter, too. The chapter after that changes to a different point-of-view character (which always involves a little loss of momentum anyway) and would be a more logical place to pause for a month or so. I suspect that’s what I’ll do.

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