ROW80 Check-in: Progress

It’s been another busy week. I’m still not sticking with the number of #wordmongering sprints per week I had optimistically set for myself, but even if I continue at only 1,000 words on Blood to Fire per week for the remainder of this round, I’ll be halfway through my manuscript by September, and should be able to focus more exclusively on that WIP once Dementional has been released.

Because, honestly, revising one manuscript while trying to write another one: Not the best idea I ever had. I spend so much time trying to figure out where I was, my sprint rounds have very low word counts, and, this week, ended up writing far ahead of where the story needs to have been (i.e. PLOT HOLE!).

So I’m going to change my plan a little, and focus primarily on Dementional for the next 3 weeks. I’m expecting the first round of editorial suggestions this week, and know I have a lot of work to do injecting the characters’ emotions into the scenes (without becoming maudlin!). It seems to be a weakness in my fiction writing that carries over from my journalistic training: I want to give all the factual details, and it makes the characters’ experience too dry. Scenes that could really build that sympathetic bridge with readers fall flat.

We’ll see whether it works better for this novel than it did for the last one.

I’ll leave the creative writing exercises (i.e. Blood to Fire) for weekends, when I have a bit more mental space to accommodate two vastly different stories, and hope that leeway loosens the juices for more robust word counts.

My next task: blurb-writing for Dementional. But now I’m inspired by the beautiful cover my publisher finalized this week.