Book Update

Hey Epic Dreamers!

I haven’t updated you on the book I’m working on in a while so I thought today’s post would be a good time to do that.

For those of you who are new to my blog or somehow missed the news, I’ll catch you up. For the past few months I’ve been working on a book inspired by a little choose-your-own-adventure-style story that I wrote for this blog. I wrote a chapter every week and everyone got to vote on what happened next. I ended up having so much fun, and everyone really liked the story and characters, that I thought why not make this bigger? Why not make it a book? 

That’s all the flashback I can give right now (I know you’re impatient to find out how it’s going) but if you want to read more about it, visit this post.

Now that you’re all caught up, on to the update! I’m not sure what kind of questions you might have, so I’ll make them up myself. ;P

Maybe they are something like this.

 

How far along are you?

I’m at the end of the first draft, which I’ve found out is by far the hardest part of a story. I always heard that it was the middle that gave people the most trouble, but that hasn’t been the case with me. Sure, I had a few spots in the middle where I felt that I was getting no where at all. Or where I just wanted to be done with the story and never have to think about it again. But those feeling didn’t last long. I’ve always heard that writers feel like nothing is happening in the middle and describe it as the least interesting part of the story, but I loved writing the scenes that take place in the middle.

But maybe I’ll change my mind when it comes to the second draft.

 

How do you feel the book is coming together so far?

At the moment? I feel this thing will never end!

So, that feeling of despair that was supposed to hit in the middle is hitting me now. I guess I should feel a new burst of energy now that I’m finally coming to a close, but I only feel burned out.

Maybe it’s because I have a tendency to know most of what will happen for the beginning and middle of a story, but the ending is always vague. I don’t really know what’s going to happen until I get there.

I thought this would be different for The Hashna Stone because I was basing it on the story I wrote for this blog. All the details for the ending was already decided.

Or so I thought.

Now that I’m ready to write the first few chapters, I realized that everything that happened in the blog version of The Hashna Stone’s end couldn’t happen in this version. Why? Well that would be a major spoiler. 😛

Before I started writing this first draft, I wrote what needed to happen in the story as steps. That’s as close to writing an actually outline as I get. But here’s what I wrote as the last steps of this story.

Step 7 take stone to King

Step 8 find way to get Ryker to suspect Bayvlad

Step 9 convince Ryker

Step 10 get out of dungeon

Step 11 battle Bayvlad

Step 12 get Hashna stone from Ryker

Step 13 end

This is what happened in the blog version of the story. Well, I have to scrap that entire thing (which would probably be close to 10 chapters) and come up with something completely different.

Trying to end a story in a way that will tie up all the loose ends, and give the characters one last challenge that will show that they’ll changed is like trying to untangle a big ball of string that a catnip-sniffing cat played with.

This story sounds like a disaster. Why are you still writing it?

Hey! Don’t call my story a disaster. Ok, so it kind of seems that way sometimes, but from what I’ve heard from other writer’s experience, feeling like your story is a disaster is normal. As much as I may feel like throwing my computer in a lake, The Hashna Stone isn’t hopeless.

It’s a first draft. There’s going to be some polishing up to do.

I know the ending will come together. It may look a bit like a Frankenstein at first, but I can do some plastic surgery in the second draft.

So no, I’m not giving up. I can’t wait to finish this first draft, so I can get on with the revision. That being said, I will be doing Camp NaNo in April and that will push me to finally finish this thing. 🙂

Well, I’m off to keep working on this Frankenstein, yarn tangled ending. If you have any questions on what I’m writing, let me know!

See you next time Epic Dreamers!