I’ve started the next edit of my novel Fratricide, and I’m making some headway. My main assignment to myself (which I detailed last week) before November started was to break the outline of the novel into a spreadsheet and, at a bare minimum, get the original draft diagrammed so I could start figuring out where I needed to change things. I did that! I broke out eight different conflicts that progressed through the story and summarized their progress across the five sections. Moving into revising said outline got a little more complicated. Part of it is that, well, I’m a pantser and I’m not entirely sure how everything’s going to change prior to me writing at least some of it. The other part is that at least a few of the conflicts are likely not going to change all that much. When I look at the romantic conflicts, as one example, any changes there are going to be entirely in reaction to other elements I change in the text. As I said, I’m a pantser, but my pantser-ness is coming into conflict with the clear to-do list that I currently have.

I came up with a compromise. I finished the revised outline for only the first section of the book, the one I’m rewriting now. This works for a couple of reasons. First off, the first section is the oldest, with the first two and a half days or so dating back around ten years ago. As such, it’s the roughest and I will be rewriting basically all of it. Second, although it’s likely some of the conflict elements might be tweaked, the first section is mostly exposition and structurally is being left alone (save for introducing a few more characters). I have changed things; I’m adding an entire day of scenes at the end to allow for more exposition of the “antagonist” fraternity, SUT. I’m still not sure exactly how that’s going to go, but I know that SUT is going to need more wordcount in order to execute on the broader conflict changes I have planned.

Speaking of wordcount, I have gone off and actually started the first section’s rewrite, and it’s going decently so far. I’ll probably need to get my rear in gear a little bit, but for right now I have about 3,200 words written across the first two ‘days’ of the story’s action. Some of this was from an initial try at a side-by-side rewrite, but the majority was written in the past 48 hours. I have (re)introduced Lance, and now comes the more careful point where I have to introduce the story’s conflict and what’s going on with the other fraternities. I’ve been told not to completely shy away from absurdity, but at the same time kind of fumbling this was what caused me to drop the draft in a huff back in 2016. I don’t think I’m at a risk of doing that, but I’m at least aware that I’ll be making decisions which will affect the rest of the story and will hopefully choose my drama carefully as a result.

I’m going to have to see how well I can pound out some wordcount on this; NaNo-like discipline is tough when I don’t have a word count goal and I also know in the back of my head that I’m probably going to land in the 70-75k range, well above a typical NaNoWriMo draft. To be clear, an end-of-November goal was never really in the cards, but if I keep my pace up then I think getting through the draft by the end of the year is not only possible but even quite feasible. The key is that I have to write every day, and I probably need to write more than I have been. I’ve been averaging about 1000 words a day so far, but if we assume a 75,000 word length I need to aiming for closer to 1250 to get this closed out by the end of the year. It’s not impossible, not anywhere near, but when you add to that these posts and weekly Cannibal Halfling posts, suddenly I’m committing to 11-12,000 words a week every week for two months. That’s a fair chunk. I may take a couple weeks off CHG in the next two months, and these posts will be just long enough to be functional (this one is certainly well under 1000 words, but that’s fine). I am willing to prioritize this project…especially if it means I have my most prized novel in a shareable format by, say, March of next year. The transition from being proud of finishing something to being proud of what that something is is one of the forces pushing me forward. And, to be honest, these first couple days of side-by-side rewriting have shown me that I shouldn’t question that I’ve grown as a writer in the past ten years. I can certainly make this better.