First Draft Struggles September 2020

Hey everyone! September is over, and I’ve bought three decorative pumpkins to celebrate fall! Well, Halloween mostly. I’ve got my pumpkins, my hot chocolate is ready to go, and my sweaters are out of storage!

So, I finished the first draft of my Beauty and the Beast retelling. It was honestly such a struggle to hit my goal. I contribute it to my complicated feelings on the fairy tale and various adaptations. I tend to favor more adventure, quest type plots, and since Beauty and the Beast’s main plot is them being in a castle together, it was a much different story than the first two retellings. I’ve already got ideas for what I want to do in the second draft to get the story where it needs to go, and I’m very excited about that. If I have time to do it in October, I will, but I’ve got a long list of things that need to be done this month before that.

Right now, I’m back to working on my Red Shoes retelling, then another pass over Mirrors of Ice, and I’ve got several projects I want to outline, so my month is pretty full of catching up on that to-do list. I’m definitely want to get my Cinderella retelling outlined, because I’m planning on doing NaNoWriMo in November with it, hopefully getting the whole thing written, around 70k rather than 50k, is what I expect for the first draft.

I definitely spend most of my revisions adding words rather than cutting them. When I do the second draft of Beasts of Beauty, I expect to add at least 20k or 40k. I ended up adding 30k words to Mirrors of Ice between the first and second draft. I’m still working on developing a process that works best for me. Right now, I tend to work in layers, doing several passes through the story as part of the process of just one of the drafts. I like working in layers, but I’d like to get faster at it, or streamline the process a little. We’ll just see how it goes.

That’s all for this time! See you guys later!