Camp NaNo – marginalia and such

Cassiel... in progress — Cassiel… in progress

That, my friends, is my pile of notes, outlines, summaries, and the first 5 chapters of Cassiel, draft 1 (aka. the wild beast). Now, here I am, nearing the first week of CampNaNoWriMo and I am actually feeling really good about choosing to rewrite Cassiel rather than rework the existing text. I feel like I’ve been living with these characters for the last 7 years (I hadn’t even realized it was that long until I looked at the original file save dates), so I know their voices and stories inside and out. Now, I just need to make them come to life in a fresher way. Just looking at those first 5 chapters, I can see how much I’ve grown as a writer. There is a serious Victorian influence running through my early writing, something that was definitely a result of too much Classic lit in school… and while I love the Victorians, I don’t want Cassiel to read like a Victorian knock-off. I want this book to have a style and tone all its own, and I am getting there! Not to too my own horn, but I’m surprised at how it’s coming along. It’s not perfect, but that’s not my goal right now. My goal is to write a solid first half of a novel, so that I can then find a balance between editing Anúna and finishing Cassiel. There was way too much time and distance between chapters when I wrote the first version of this book and I don’t want to fall into that trap again. That way lies the bad place! No no, I much prefer to stay closer to this draft. I do feel stronger about the last quarter of the original and some of the dialogue, so I do plan on printing the rest of it out and going through to find those nuggets of inspiration, but I think this will be a mostly new draft all around.

I’m ahead of my word count goal for the week, which is surprising given that I’ve been writing in the space between my eating breakfast and leaving for work (with kitty cat cuddle time squeezed in to keep kitty from attacking me for attention). The plan for the weekend is to put in another 3000 words. And do some yoga. I seriously need to stretch after all this desk time.

Cassiel, rewrite draft 1 (Camp NaNo word goal)

The day is almost upon us… Camp NaNo lurks just around the corner with its frantic writing goal. I’ve got my “plan”–which is really just a list of ideas I’ve been plotting for Cassiel Draft 2 (or, as I like to think of it, taming the wild beast). I printed out the first five chapters of the original draft (written oh so many moons ago) and realized it’s damn long. And I mean loooooong. As in, nearly a quarter of the length of Anúna Draft 1–and that one clocked in at around 80k. Seriously, when I say this is an exercise in wrangling my word story into something neat and orderly, I mean it. It’s way too involved. Unless I break it into several parts, it just doesn’t work as a YA length novel. My goal is to get around 20k works down in April and have a solid start at a new draft. Entirely new. I was toying with revising and reworking what I have, but I feel that the second half is stronger than the first, so a solid first half should be my greatest priority for this one, at least for now. I love my characters and I love my settings, but I have to get my plot under control. I kind of wish I had more time to research some of the elements I’m uncertain about, but it’s been a mad month. I’ll work with what I have.

In other news… I haven’t reached my editing goal for the month 😦 . I have two more chapters before I finish the first round of revisions on Chapters 5-10. Mad month, after all. Not that April will be any better…

Ah! Writing!