New Year, Not So New Project

Ah, 2017. For me, it was personally excellent, full of major changes. A new manuscript. A new job. Getting engaged. Buying our first house. A new niece to dote on. This year was exhausting and nerve wracking in so many ways, but with a lot (!) of elbow grease, there were also so many rewarding moments. So much to be thankful for.

Looking forward to next year, I’m hoping I can snuggle down and settle into all these things. Also, now that most of the boxes are unpacked and we’ve set up a life routine of sorts, I’d love to participate more in the local KidLit community. Being a PitchWars mentor this year was definitely a highlight–I loved joining the crowds to cheer on the mentees and helping one awesome writer in particular in a meaningful way–I hope to do it again next year, but also, I’d love to stretch that seasonal PitchWars community feeling into a year-round experience!

On the writing front, after a glorious year romping around with a new cast of characters and a totally new world in the HM manuscript, 2018 is going to involve returning to an old manuscript and revising, yet again.

Writing is rewriting is rewriting is rewriting, a lesson this TPOPF manuscript seems specially designed to torture remind me of year after year. Someday, someday I’ll get this book right! As of this month I’m diving into what probably amounts to the fourth complete rewrite of this novel since 2013, not counting the more half-step revisions in-between that involved rearranging scenes and scrapping and replacing a handful of chapters. (Mere child play compared to a rewrite! ha-haha…)

What does a rewrite entail? Well, for TPOPF, at this point I think I’m keeping a grand total of 500 words—a handful of sentences from one scene—from the last 50,000 word version. [bites nails] Only 500! This is simultaneously terrifying, frustrating, and a relief. (Wouldn’t it be nice to write the story the right way the first time? Do other people do that? Don’t tell me.) On the bright side, instead of feeling like I’m rehashing the same story again (again!) after four years of tapping out those same dance steps, it instead feels like I’m taking these characters I adore and have had so much fun with and sending them on an entirely new and exciting adventure that even I am going to be surprised by. Beyond those 500 words, the only other things remaining are a subset of the cast of characters and their relationships to each other, though their motivations are completely reimagined and every step they take in this new draft will take them down a completely new, never-before tread path.

In 2017, I wrote HM. Then I completely rewrote it, preserving maybe more like 12K from one draft to the next. It wasn’t easy, because each one of those carryover sentences was massaged and tweaked as I changed tenses and also aged the book from YA to MG. But it feels good walking into 2018, knowing I’ve done this sort of work before and I can do it again.