Shoes and Beasts August 2020
Hello! August is over, and I can’t believe how fast it went by. Don’t get wrong, I like summer well enough (I’m a big tank top fan), but I much prefer colder weather. It’s a lot easier to get warmer than it is to cool off. Also, fall colors and Halloween!
After I did a final pass over Stalks of Gold, I worked on my Red Shoes retelling.
It’s been driving me crazy. I’m starting to think I’m physically incapable of anything that’s not 100k. I like writing very character heavy and plot heavy stories, and having the character’s change be slow and heavily intertwined with the plot. I like focusing on the journey and growth for a bigger payoff at the end. Because of that, I tend to make characters very flawed, something I struggled with in Stalks of Gold too. Sometimes they’re flawed to a point of being unlikable, which is subjective. My point being, I have a hard time taking a really flawed, almost unlikable character through a realistic arc in anything short of novel.
I’ve set my Red Shoes aside for the moment. I think I’m close to working it out, but we’ll see.
Instead, I decided to go ahead and start my Beauty and the Beast/Little Red Riding Hood retelling. I started the original version of this story years ago when I was in high school. The idea has gone through a lot of changes since then, but now I’m finally coming back to it!
The first draft started off really strong. I felt like I was flying through the words. I was already familiar with my lead male, Chasen, since he was in Mirrors of Ice, so I feel like I have a good understanding of him. My female lead, Aerona, is a little more complicated, but her character has been fairly constant despite the changes I’ve made to the concept. Early on in the draft, I ended up deviating some from my outline which came to bite me back later on. I was going to leave it and fix in the second draft, but it threw me off enough that I decided to go back and fix it because I needed to know exactly where the characters were in their dynamic. Now that I’ve gotten that straightened out, I’m back on track.
I’m 40k into Beasts of Beauty, and I’m aiming to finish the first draft by the end of September. I’m also going to work on my outline for the next retelling so I’ll be ready!