I finally finished the latest draft. I’m a pantser and a newbie, so when I sat down to do a developmental edit on manuscript it need a LOT of work. This last draft has taken forever. I waffled endlessly on adding Medea’s POV and when I did, it made some significant changes to the storyline.
New advice for writer’s block: If you get stuck, write the same scene from another characters POV. You may think you had them down, but their insight will drastically change the tone, possibly even the dialogue.
With the addition of Medea, I’d added a new character loop and made her rules a lot more clear…which was messing up my original ending. I tried to pick up where I left off and it wasn’t working. So I followed my own rule (back up and try something else). I started writing a whole new ending.
It was epic and fun and very Hollywood with a Home Alone vibe. And while the scene was fun, it absolutely did not complete my main character’s arc (cue Sacha Black‘s voice telling me to close those loops), which made it hollow. It worked for Medea, but not for Nikolai. To learn his lesson (finally), he needed the original ending. I found a way to sidestep Medea’s rules and make the original ending work. I will probably save the alternate ending and use it as a reader magnet for my mailing list (it IS a fun scene).
So what now? Well I still have micro editing to do. I kept changing the year, from 1956 to 1953 to 1955 so I have to check the timeline continuity. Gotta check my crutch words (if you’re an author and don’t have a crutch word list, make one!). Gotta find a new round of beta readers wiling to read 128k.
My brain is already springing forward to NaNo. I need to prep for book 2 so I can get it written, hopefully by the end of the year. I’m taking a week vacation in October just so I can write. Not sure how much I can get done in November this year, but I’m going to try.
Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.
