Writing Update
How are things going on the literary front these days? Well, I’m currently expending most of my mental energy and creative efforts on a manuscript that I’ve called Project Muligul, since I don’t have a proper title for it yet. It’s a fantasy western with a female protagonist that I’ve been working on for just under a year. As I sit here typing this, my current word count is about 95,000 and I’m on Draft 7 in the revision process.
My intention is that once Draft 7 is finished I’ll be able to pass it off to a few beta readers so I can finally get some feedback from people who read in the fantasy genre. I’ve been so stuck in the story by myself that I really need some external input! But the story is not quite polished enough to share with anyone else at this moment (the exception being my Incredibly Supportive Husband, who received the first ever printed-off draft for Christmas, with multiple iterations of, “It’s not quite finished yet but I really want you to read it!”).
Revision is tough! I thought the initial drafting was tough, when the words were flowing and I wrote 50,000 in two weeks, but I think revision is tougher. It’s hard work, going through a story again and again and again, figuring out where certain scenes fit, which characters are needed or not, if the overall flow works, how to fix certain plot holes (which invariably creates more plot holes). I have to wear my Editor Hat, but not be taken over by said Editor Hat (a rather critical entity).
This is also the first novel I’ve gotten this far on, so I’m still learning the process of novel writing and how I work. I don’t know how many revisions most people do, but I’m on my sixth major round of revisions. At this point, while the overall plot is the same as Draft 1, very few (if any) scenes have made it through from that draft; everything has been rewritten in some fashion (and thank goodness for that). And this is all without showing it to an actual editor yet! Once that happens, even more revisions will be forthcoming.
(A note on word count for those of you who aren’t writers, or are writers who don’t note your word count. A book of 50,000 words is a very short novel. A book of 80,000 is pretty standard, though fantasy novels are frequently 100,000 or higher.)
Allons-y!
