First Draft Woes May 2020

Hey everyone! This past month, I’ve been super busy diving into my first draft of my next fairy tale retelling, Mirrors of Ice. It’s a combination of Snow White and The Snow Queen that I have been dying to work on. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been kicking around ideas for a Snow Queen retelling, so actually sitting down to write it is so exciting.

So, at the beginning of May, I sat down with my outline and dove right into it. I’ve been trying to write it as quickly as possible, mostly to try and push myself on how much I can write a day. It’s had its ups and downs so far. I’m a decent ways through it, but once I got past the beginning and hit the middle, I really hit a wall. I’ve been really struggling with the middle and the end, but I know I’m going to fix it in later drafts.

My priority is to get the most important things down, and I’m close. I expect to finish up the first draft in a couple weeks. Then, I’ll be able to go back and wrestle with the things that are giving me the most grief, name the character relationships and the breakneck pacing. Honestly, I’m so hardwired to want to write series long slow-burns that for this book and the last, writing one-book romances has been such a struggle. I’m all about the pining, the yearning, the misunderstandings!

There are also some tricky narrator aspects I’m trying to pull off, and it’s just not quite there yet. It’ll be really cool if I can pull it off, but it’s definitely going to take some refining to get it just right.

It also hasn’t helped that when I hit my middle/end slump, I started thinking about and kicking around a few ideas for new series I want to write. So, now all I want to do is work on those ideas because they’re all shiny and new. Which, makes it so hard to refocus and just compounds the issue. But, I’m determined to get through the slump!

Hopefully, next time I check in, I’ll have the draft done and figured out where the major problems are. I’ll see you all next time!