Update on ALDEN RIDGE

I'm going to try something new coming up. I've really been enjoying reading about the ups and downs of Karen Mahoney and Rachel Vincent as they write, and I've decided to do something similar. I find that it's nice to have the brief update posts from authors that I'm interested in, and perhaps my doing the same will be a good counterpoint to the longer Thoughts on Writing and Agent Search posts that I make. Those have completely been the focus of the blog so far, and that sort of content will continue to be a prominent feature here, but there's a limit to how many of those I can write during a week while still making progress on my actual book writing. So we'll see how this goes, and whether this is actually of interest to anyone, or what.

As to the actual subject of this post, the update on ALDEN RIDGE: things are going slow, word count wise. I wrote about 500 words tonight, which is 500 more words than I've written the entire rest of the week. That might sound like I've done no work on the book, but actually I've made tons of notes and done lots of preplanning. I actually outlined a full eighteen chapters that could take me to one possible ending of the book--not that I plan on sticking to that too closely (plus, if I just wrote those chapters, this book would only be something like 60-70K words, which is way too short). But that outline gives me something of a yardstick to shoot for, and already I've been flushing it out even more, revising it, and coming up with sub-plots that go along with it.

I had hit a point where I realized that I simply wasn't that interested in this book, not in the way I am in THE GUARDIAN. That was mostly because the story itself wasn't powerful enough to me, and I didn't connect enough with the characters yet. The setting was great, as I had spent the most time on that and general worldbuilding in my prewriting, but what I realized was the I only had the beginnings of an actual story. I've spent my writing time in the last couple of weeks correcting that, so that now I have a really story that I'm really excited about, and characters that are complex and that I connect with, to go along with the setting. That sort of work will probably remain ongoing until the book is complete, but at least I have a strong framework to add to, now.

So, while I'm still unhappy with my low wordcount so far on this project, I'm hoping that will pick up soon. My preplanning has really revitalized my outlook on this project, and I'm really excited about that.

7,353 / 95,000(7.7%)