My Messy Writing Process

I was on maternity leave in 2017 after my second daughter, who is now 8, and she was ten months old when NaNoWriMo was going to happen.  My kids were both napping at the same time so I had that hour and a half in the afternoon to do something with.  That whole “sleep when the baby sleeps” thing is garbage - I never could do it.

I had a story brewing, I’d make notes on my phone during the late night feedings, so I figured why not try to write a novel in a month?

The goal: 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s 1666.67 words per day, at a rate of 1000 words per hour (my usual), I could probably do it with some extra early morning or late night writing sessions.

So I did.  I’d set them up for a nap, scramble down to my writing desk and force myself to write. I didn’t have much of an outline but I wrote in scenes and then I tried to stitch them together.

I completed the novel, and I “won” NaNoWriMo by accomplishing my goal. The novel was a hideous first draft.

Two years later, in 2019, after a third daughter -  something about childbirth makes me need to be productive in weird spurts - I hired a writing coach to try to make sense of that draft that had been sitting on my hard drive collecting dust.  She introduced me to crafting plots and the Dark Night of the Soul. 

I worked on it, rewriting and trying to configure a structure, and made a second draft.  It was up to 73,000 words, which is acceptable in the commercial publishing space. I hate the names of my characters and there some super cringe bits in there. I know I’m going to have to kill many darlings.

I gave up somewhere along the way and haven’t touched it in five years.  This month I pulled it out and started re-reading it and the story is not terrible but it needs a lot of work.  There was a problem, and that problem was that it was actually two books and two stories.  So I am splitting it up and am now rewriting two drafts.  It's an auto-sequel.  I just want to finish something. Just one. Shiny object syndrome keeps getting me.