Tag: Kyrios

Beta to First Draft

I miss writing like crazy every day. I’m editing and revising instead, trying to turn the beta iteration of the first novel in my Incomplete States series into the first draft. My imagination is chaffing. It doesn’t like being shut down.

To say ‘It’s going well’ is so sloppy to the thinking, writing, and creative process that I eschew using it. What those three words mean is that I haven’t encountered any “OMG WHAT IS THIS CRAP?” moments. I’m enjoying reading the novel. Not many changes have been required, although there are some notes on potential changes to make later, depending on what happens in the next three books in the series. They’re waiting their turn.

Writing like crazy is the fun, addictive part. That’s what I like about writing, spin up the imagination and release it on hyperdrive. Every day, my muses and writing addiction attempt to trick me with the “Let’s write something else today” game. But I know me. This part is necessary. I was thinking last night, I have ten other unpublished novels that I wrote and completed as a first draft that I never did any more with because I prefer the writing-like-crazy excitement over the “Let’s edit and revise this mother into something presentable” stage where I now dwell.

So, yeah, this must be done. And yeah, I remind myself, I need to attend the business end of advertising and so on for the other novels published because they will not sell themselves.

Covers are done for the four books. Yes, I know, why are the covers done if you don’t have a first draft completed? It’s a carrot thing. Having the covers help me visualize the completed novels as something tangible. And I wanted to have covers, so nah-nah-nah, I made some. Yes, I made them.

Changed the first novel’s title too. Kyrios wasn’t working for me in the completed visualization process so the title became Four on Kyrios. Who knows what it’ll end up being? That title feels right for now but it felt right with the last title, didn’t it?

Time to edit like crazy. Just doesn’t have the same feel to it, does it?

 

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Beautiful and Terrifying

In today’s writing metaphor, I’m weaving a trilogy.

I’ve been writing here in the coffee shop for two hours. I still have three-quarters of my drink remaining.

Sitting down to write, I opened a floodgate to the dam of words – sorry, another metaphor – and they gushed out. Again came an unanticipated scene, and a surprising pivot. With it came more tangible substance about the third novel, and what’s to happen in it. And with that, I began writing the third novel of the “Incomplete States” trilogy (previously known as “Long Summer”). Still have some to write with the first novel to complete the initial draft, though. I was reluctant to do it, and that’s when the weaving metaphor arrived.

Novel three didn’t have a working title. Creating the Word doc, I just called it Book Three. I didn’t want to slow down to think of a title. I just wanted to get those words into the computer. Between books one and three, I wrote one chapter in book one, and the kernal of a chapter in book three, about thirty-two hundred words total.

It’s been an excellent day of writing like crazy. It’s fucking exciting, even though it’s also sometimes beautiful but terrifying. I put it like that because I see and know the scenes and the arcs, but I don’t know the words and the details, and I worry that I’ll lose them before the trilogy is finished. It became such an intense experience that sometimes I needed to get up and walk around to vent enough energy to focus and type.

It’s fun and exciting, too, being in these stories with these characters, on vivid other worlds and starships. Sometimes, it feels like I’m there, experiencing it through them, and then returning to this life to record what happened. Crazy, right?

Yes. I guess that’s a side-effect of writing like crazy.

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