The time has come once again for my works in progress update!
To my own surprise, I’m still working on the story treatment for Roc Rider book two. I had intended to be well into the first draft by now, but a mental logjam has been stymieing my progress. As I worked on the treatment something just wasn’t sitting right with me. Even though none of the ideas I was including up to that point were bad, many I was even quite excited about, the treatment was leaving me ill at ease.
I thought at first that perhaps I was forcing the connections between the various elements of the story I was trying to include. As I’ve mentioned in past blog articles, book two picks up the story at the place in time where I had originally intended the series to begin. I realized while writing book one that I was starting in the wrong place and needed to go back a little earlier in time to give the story a stronger opening. I wondered if perhaps I was trying to keep too many elements from the story as it was before I made that change and forcing connections within the plot.
While there was indeed a little bit of that going on, there was another problem I hadn’t been able to identify yet. I kept digging. Was there something wrong with character motivations? Did I have a bad opener?
As generally happens with these things, when I finally discovered the answer it was so simple I nearly had to slap myself for not noticing it sooner. This simple fix has a huge impact on the overall story, mind, and I’m now faced with rewriting much of it. Nevertheless, with that bud nipped I now have been making rapid progress once again and am quite happy with where the treatment is headed.
Admittedly I still had some small reservations about the story treatment method going into this, but after this little experience they are much reduced. Had I simply started into the draft as I have in the past I would be staring down the prospect of cutting, replacing, and/or rewriting something over 10,000 words worth of material, if not more. As it is, I can make the adjustments in the treatment with far less labor involved.
My hope and expectation are that this process will make drafting the second book go more quickly than it did with the first, allowing me to get the second book in your hands that much quicker. Fingers crossed I’m right!
As for other projects, I don’t have much to report other than one small thing. I have decided that going into the new year, some adjustments to my writing routine and process and necessary. Among these, I chose to designate Friday as my day to work on side writing projects such as short stories, the text-based adventure games etc.
I’ve toyed with the notion of doing this several times in the past, but I could never get past the idea of losing a whole day of main project writing to a side project every week. However, I’ve realized that doing it this way is better because it places a limit on how much time these projects can take away from my main one, which is why I now think it will be quite effective.
Those who follow this blog know that I’ve been wrestling with the problem of how to fit these side projects into my writing schedule without slowing down production on my main book project for quite a while. Hopefully this new schedule will let me start to get more of them out to you over time.
That’s all I have for you today. Cheers, and thanks for reading.
Aaron
