Ostensibly this blog is supposed to be oriented more towards my writing. But a look back over the past few months shows I haven't blogged about my latest novel in a while. Since January, in fact.
Why?
The truth is I've struggled mightily to push through to a second draft. I had a huge crash after the Viable Paradise workshop in Sept. 2008. Don't get me wrong, it was a great workshop, and I learned TONS. But for various reasons, my faith in the story was shaken by my experience there. It took me about 4 months to convince myself that I still believed in what I was doing with this story.
When I finally started revising properly again (as opposed to just fiddling as I'd been doing since VP), things went reasonably well up to a point, and then I got sucked into the mire that is a sagging middle. I bogged down like peat.
But I slogged through, at times painfully, and I now have what I consider to be a reasonable 2nd draft. It needs a bit of polish before going out for critique, but I hope to have what I'm tentatively calling draft 2.5 earlier in the new year. Then after critique feedback, I'm shooting for Draft 3 sometime in spring/early summer 2010.
Over the next few weeks I hope to do a few blog posts about how my process differed between my first novel and this second one.