Monday, September 29, 2014

Progress so far

Hmm, my last post was nearly six weeks ago and at the time I had three stories in the works. I am sad to say that I still have the same three stories in the works.

"Summer Secrets" is still in peculating mode. The second draft is complete and I am going to let it sit for an undetermined amount of time before starting the third draft. I want to distance myself from the story so that I can read it with fresh eyes.

I worked on "Coffee and Cigarettes: A Love Story" from my last posting until the first week of September, during which time I added a measly 6,500 words.  It was a busy time for me and my weekends, when I get the lion share of my writing done, were filled with social obligations. Shocking, but true.

I got inspired to take up my other unfinished story. It has been in the hands of someone who expressed interest in reviewing it for me. The person is very busy. I value their opinion so I am more than willing to wait until they have the time give me their feedback. During this wait, the ending of my story began to bug me the more I thought about it. Also, I'd occasionally get ideas of little extra details to add to the story. So, I started another draft of the story. I worked my way through its entire 200 plus pages, making my changes and reworking sentences only to get to the end and decide that I didn't like my new ending either. This was yesterday. I was pretty annoyed since I'd put in a lot of hours not only writing, but pondering the story and I felt like I'd wasted my time. Until today.

I realized what my ending was missing, I hope. I deleted the last 15% of the story and I am going to rewrite it from scratch. I'd been trying to use my original ending, but tweak it until I liked it and it did not work well. I am hoping that by writing the ending from scratch (more or less) I will have more success.

Also today I realized the missing piece for my third story in the Bethany series. I had a lot of ideas for the story, but it was missing the spark that would make the story take off for me. I believe I fond the spark. We will see if it is still there when I finally get started on writing it.

Enough for now.

I hope to post more soon.

Varian