All my darlings are dead
Well, most of them
Dead words are everywhere. About half the book I’ve been working on since last November.
Even the opening chapter, which was submitted to an anthology and had been edited so hard, so very, very hard.
I had been working on the first Five Empires book, looking at splitting it between the stories of three characters, charting their course through the world.
I’d written about 65,000 words when I realised I had set up one character wrong and re-wrote all her chapters. I plunged on, and got back up to 68,000 words.
I stalled again.
I’m a pantser, so stalling happens a lot.
Also, I think I may have been cursed by an eldritch abomination because everything in my life seemed to be on fire.
I was sick for a week. I took antibiotics. The antibiotics waited a week then gave me hives and anaphylaxis. Then I had surgery, or didn’t, because we had a pregnancy scare.
Then I had surgery again, properly this time. We discovered my ankle isn’t properly healed and I have crutches and a boot to wear for four weeks.
Did I mention I was supposed to be working on a 10k piece for my summer PhD panel? And doing two exams in Ancient Greek? HELLO.
Everything stopped on the novel. Ground completely to a halt. I didn’t want to do anything except sit and wiggle my toes occasionally. I did keep learning Ancient Greek though. Because that shit is a nightmare mountain you don’t want to have to keep climbing.
I decided I was sick of this, so I signed up for NWAL 2018 to kick my butt into gear. The first thing that came out of the exercises I did at the start of that? Half this novel is gone. Dust. Into the graveyard at the bottom of the Scrivener file called “Rejected Chapters”.
Well, almost.
Some of those darlings, including possibly that beloved first chapter, may end up being exhumed from their tomb in the second book in the series.
I realised the whole thing didn’t work with three character POVs. It needed to be just the two twin sisters, parallel stories as they tried to find each other again.
This happens over and over again, probably more to pantsers than plotters, unless you’re a plotter who’s gone through that whole “Oh god, none of this works at all” and thrown even your best laid plans into the fire.
At this point, I am possibly back to square one, which is a bit depressing, although I suppose it does set me up well for doing NWAL 2018 on June 1st. I have promised myself I will get myself back into writing fiction, so this is a good place to start.
