State of the WIPs

Lorem Ipsum:  

I mentioned in one of my NaNoWriMo drama posts that I'd actually completed the challenge. Between the rubbernecking, the pneumonia, my cat having an ear infection, and the holidays, I did actually write 50k words on a new project. 

And you know what? I had a blast. It's not that I never got stuck, but I didn't get stuck in the same ways that I have while writing a "zero" draft before. I was never scrambling for what happens next. 

The magic sauce was being open to the idea of being wrong about what I wrote, but writing it anyways. Maybe this plot beat isn't happening in the right place, or maybe this characterization isn't right, or maybe this scene needs to happen in a different location. Who knows! I usually get so bogged down in trying to figure that stuff out, but as a very linear writer, I cannot see the shape of the whole story until I finish it. So I was trying to guess, getting anxious about what the end would be, not knowing where it all was going, and then just stalling out. 

This time, I shrugged, reminded myself that the next draft is the most important one, and just wrote something. If I was seriously stuck, I skipped to the next scene that I could envision. More often than not, that helped me shake loose some threads and unstick the prior scene anyways. (Again, linear writer. This felt very scary the first few times!) 

I did not finish my story, but I do have 50k ish words that I had fun writing. Lorem is an urban, portal fantasy with some romance elements. Themes are found family, narcissistic parents, and personal agency. I'm excited to come back to it later. 

But first,

The Last Firstborn 

This was a project I started for NaNoWriMo 2021. It is a dystopian science-fantasy about a prophet living in a hyper-capitalist hellscape. Dune meets Final Fantasy VII. The themes are personal agency, bodily autonomy, and capitalism. After writing 50k words that November, I finished up the zero draft in Feb 2022. I worked on other projects for a while, but came back to LFB with a self-edit completed in Sept 2023. 

My plan is to go through it again in the first few months of 2024, then send it to beta readers. Eventually, I'd like to query this project and pursue traditional publication. But for right now, it's too damn long! At 143k words and still wanting to add to the ending, I need to rein this sucker in. I've read that for a debut, you don't want to query anything more than about 100k, which... hurts me. 

I never thought I was an over-writer, but here I am. CHOP CHOP.