Day 130

Spoiler Alert! May contain planning-stage plot/character details or other spoilers!

12 Nov 2016

Some #castle ✨😊

A photo posted by Katrina Wiggins (@kaiedesign) on

Lost track for a bit there; it’s been a good few days of sorting out paperwork for my editor. Deposit and first instalment are now paid, and substantive edit manuscript sent as of Monday. It was a huge mess, of course; mainly Beta draft, but with significant edits to the first chapter and a first half dozen chapters reworked and shuffled to read from only Cole and Cadence’s perspectives. And nearly 100,000 words, which was not ideal, but in the interests of moving things forward… For the rest of the week, I’ve been trying to answer some very simple questions for the edit; character motivations, premise and publication categories (genre). Yeah, really shouldn’t have taken a week, but unsurprisingly… SO while every named character - and there are lots - had a backstory and fairly clear core motivation, none of them really had good ‘story goals’ - missions, basically. More or less the same problem with the premise; Cole, as I knew all along, is kind of passive through the whole thing, with stuff happening and others - mostly Cadence and Ravel - moving her along. So building a story arc around that gets a little… Took me about about four stabs at the premise to even distil down to something acceptable, although at least part of the trouble was making the distinction between a detailed plot structure and a basic premise - as usual, not great at being concise. But I think I’ve got it down to something reasonable, which is good. Once that’s gone, I can go through the same murky process to chart and hopefully better edit that excerpt into a short story for a YA magazine call. Then I’ve got until the end of the month… now only half a month, how did that happen… to either work on another creative project, or push for more consulting work… or both, I suppose. There’s been a fairly steady trickle of work coming through, but not enough to catch up with costs between paying my own consultant, travelling and day to day costs. But as usual, if I ramp up the consulting work, it’s not easy to step it back down again, and I’ll need to start the (probably extensive) rewrites at the end of the month. But money would be nice… but another creative work is either publicity or money or both if all goes well… so yeah, convoluted math all around. Meanwhile, I’m wondering what I’m doing sitting on the edge of Scotland and never leaving my room, lol. Oh, work…

Saturday

Start time: 11 am

Mallaig: The Lodge at the West Highland Hotel, bed

Drinking: Lady Grey tea with turmeric

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