It's been a busy few weeks, which is why I haven't blogged in a while. Work has been crazy busy, and the weather, well, it's just been crazy! (I'm so ready for winter to be over!)
The good news is that I've finished reading the current draft of my novel to my wife aloud (see How I Write-Part 5: Editing, Rewriting & Beta Readers, Oh My!), and am in the process of making the edits we noted.
Reading your entire story (novel/novella/short story/etc.) aloud to someone you trust is an excellent exercise that I highly recommend for all writers. Together, my wife and found areas in the storyline that needed some additional fleshing out, a character that needed further development and in one instance, where a key relationship between two important characters wasn't quite working as I had intended. Beyond that, however, my wife also provided a host of additional suggestions here and there, which I believe will make the story that much stronger. While it may sound like we basically ripped the book to shreds and now I have tons of work to get it all back together, in truth, a handful well -placed sentences will take care of most of the edits we noted. And, even if there were deeper issues that made it necessary to rewrite large portions of the book, I'd rather do so now, then find out after I've published that the story doesn't work.
So what are my next steps?
Once I've finished making this round of edits, which includes compiling the book in its entirety (all front matter materials, appendices, etc.), I'll send the book off to my editor for her review and mark-ups. This means that the time I have been devoting to this story will soon be available for my next project...which has put me in a bit of a dilemma. This book I'm wrapping up, Your Truth is Out There, is the first in a three-book series. I've already started book two, and it's going well, but another project has popped up that has me thinking of setting book two aside. This other story is not a new project, but one based on a (longish) short story I wrote several years ago. It's a post-apocalyptic story...well, I suppose that's only technically true. It takes place on the eastern seaboard of post-apocalyptic America, but that is more of the setting than anything else. The story is really less about war and violence and more about the people—two people in particular. Two men who have never met before, but who have much more in common than either would have thought.
Even though I've received favorable comments from those who read it, the story never worked as a short—there's just too much there. My original plan was to write series of five or six shorts in this "world" that, when put together, would equal one complete novel-length story. The more I ponder it, however, the more I believe each of those shorts could be a full-length novel in and of itself, each leading to the climatic finale. As much as the current story is a fun, sci-fi adventure, with characters I adore and enjoy writing about, the post-apocalyptic story is a deeper, somewhat darker, but a potentially very important tale (if I can pull it off correctly). It's one of those stories that just feels like it needs to be told.
So that is my conundrum—which story do I work on next. The more dynamic of my readers will likely advise me to work on both at the same time. That isn't likely, for two reasons: first, I simply can't "live" in both worlds at the same time. They'll, without fail, crossover into one another, with disastrous results. Second, as long as it seems to take for me to finish just one book at a time, I can't imagine trying to complete two. So thank you, no, I'll stick to writing one at at time. I just need to decide which one—do I continue straight through the current three-book series, remaining immersed in that universe and those characters, without stepping away? Or do I step into post-apocalyptic America for a while, write the first book in that series, before coming back for book two of the Find Your Truth series?
As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions!