About the writing itself, of Remember When.

Today's post is a technical one, but I wanted to revisit some things mentioned in passing about the process by which Remember When came to be... and how that process has had to change to get going on the new-novel.

Remember When, as a story, emerged from an inspiration... but that inspiration wasn't about the beginning of the tale. It was an attempt to reconcile my reaction to something only tangentially related to the story. There was a period of time of roughly twelve hours between the inspiration causing me to immediately write down notes that became the first page of the novella, and the desire to then write the story. When that desire hit home, however, it was sure a good thing I didn't have any plans or obligations for a couple of days. I use the terms "Writing Fugue" and "a deep dive" to try and describe what happened. In plainer language, I wrote for about twenty hours with only incidental breaks, had the body of the story written and a clear idea of the parts that weren't. All and all, it was just under forty hours over three days to get a complete first draft that I felt... relieved... to have written. It also was in desperate need of editing and rewrites. Several sections were confused to the point of being inexplicable to anyone other than me.

So, in the finest tradition of "just get it done, right", I called upon some friends who had experience writing or editing for published writers. Somehow, not a one of them burst out laughing at me. Go figure. A week of hacking at obvious mistakes, senseless pronoun usage, and some very confusing linkage issues, it was a lot better. Three parts were identified that needed rewrite work. Those took more time to get right, and while I fixed those (twice in the case of one of them) the first round of Critical Reading happened. These brave "beta testers" found more things, and a lot of grammar to polish up. Two more weeks past to get things in a shape I finally felt proud of.

Three and a half weeks to get a 16k word novella as a "final" draft manuscript. A bit more time after that to migrate it to a platform suitable to then generate the e-pub files, and some last minute corrections. A desperate delay over getting the Cover Art done, which was overcome by amazingly good fortune alone. 10.August start -> 17.September on-sale.

Kids, don't try this at home.

Lessons learned for future application:

1) The greatest single motivator is a burning desire to actually see a job through to the end. Promise yourself a reward; Make it a matter of Pride; Hell, imagine that there is someone who will be proud of you for achieving a job done right, even if there isn't a real person in your life who would feel that way. Just get it done.

2) Inspired is great... essential really. Planned is better. Making an orderly plan that then can be addressed in inspiration-fueled "dives" will result in a whole lot less effort to clean up in editing.

3) Know how big a bite you are trying to take. There is a reason most properly planned fiction writing is fully outlined prior to any significant writing: you really can only produce about 10k words that aren't craptastic fluff text in a single push. That's a fraction of any project bigger than a short story. Milestone any longer effort, and apply that Motivation mentioned in (1) above to hitting each milestone. A novel of 40-100k words is probably going to be months of writing even if madness occasionally takes you. Hit those marks and the time will be well-used.

4) Get your Editor involved early. If they are someone you want to have input into the outline, put that in front of them. As you finish a first draft of a chapter and move on, kick that over to the Editor. They need time, too. Good editing often takes several passes at it, over a time far longer than it took you to write it. If you want to get to a final draft anytime this decade, you probably want to have the editing well underway by the time you get to the first draft of the last chapter.

Now, if you'll kindly excuse me, I have one more Marketing thing to do for Remember When...

*** If you purchased Remember When and have not submitted a Review of it to the Amazon Kindle page you purchased it from, Please Do Leave A Review. We really need more reviews. If you haven't already recommended this novella to everyone you know, yeah, that would help too.***

...and then I have two weeks of serious milestones to hit on the new-novel. I'll try to do things here and respond to comments as I go. Thank you all!