Hello, Spooky Friends!

I promised myself I wouldn’t go on and on about it already being October, and I won’t! But it is, however, OcPOEber! It’s the beginning of the spooky season for those who don’t already keep Spooky in their hearts all year. I don’t know any of those people, but in the event they are reading this, welcome to the shivering joy the rest of us have been experiencing for months, if not years!

So, what’s new with me? When last we spoke, I mentioned that Betwixt is coming along slowly. Since then, it has ground to a complete stop. There was just something fundamentally flawed with the words I had written, and when I explained my literary constipation to Sarah, my work-bestie, she sagely suggested I stop everything and re-read Spellbound. Y’all, she’s so good. I didn’t make it a full chapter into Spellbound before I realized how badly I had gone astray with Betwixt.

The answer, as strange as it seems, is to scrap everything and start over from the beginning. Nothing gets wasted when you’re a writer, so the original draft will be pulled from, I’m sure, but starting over from the start allows me to put the project back on the right path and properly write the characters as I see them in my imagination. To continue with what I had would just paint me into a corner, and it’s early enough in the project to avoid that horrible fate entirely.

I suppose that means I should be welcoming you to the beginning of me writing book 2 of the Boston Falls series! Weeee!

Since we don’t talk to Miss NaNo anymore, but still enjoy the fun of torturing challenging ourselves alongside others, the plan for now is to spend October getting the outline/planning/plot grid all filled out in the course of this month—Plotober. Then, when November hits, we jump into 2k words a day to try to get a fairly substantial new rough draft written before December.

This is, to be sure, an ambitious goal, but I have faith in myself to steer this ship back on track. Or at least away from those specific cliffs. And hopefully not into another set of cliffs. But this is what it means to be a writer, you guys. Dodging land masses. And with that stellar segue typed…

From the mess to the masses,

NFT