19 April 2012

Dratted Second Draft

I wrote the first season of Babes in Spyland in less than two weeks. I edited it over the next two weeks and pretty much had it “finished” in a month. Bing, bam boom...done!

Season two is proving to be MUCH more challenging. I'm not sure if it's just because my mind keeps wandering off into the realms of writing three other novels I want to work on, or if my plan for the plot just wasn't quite good enough to keep the words and scenes together, or if I very simply don't write well in the spring, or if the pressure of a follow up season is nagging at the back of my mind, but I've been working on it for six weeks and have just now finished the first edit.

Okay, so a season is between 20,000 and 25,000 words. So not that many, right? But I've learned that the wrong 8,000 words in the middle messes up the entire lot! Argh...

Breathing. Still breathing.

In an attempt to look on the bright side of life (as opposed to never expecting the Spanish Inquisition) I am going to take some time and chronicle what I've learned about storytelling over the past six weeks. Because it's been quite a bit. And I've got quite a long way to go, but I hope the distance has diminished somewhat. I'm hoping all of this will help me get through my next novel faster. And most of all, I'm hoping that as I go, both my writing and my storytelling will improve. The plan is to entertain people—that's what I want to do. :)

On a funny note, as I was editing the last few episodes of Babes 2, I found myself laughing out loud. Always good when I laugh at something I wrote. Hopefully it's not just funny to me.

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