I sat down to write this blog and realized I didn’t have a specific topic I wanted to touch on. I’ve been hard at work on the rough draft of book 2 which has turned so real progress. Last week finally managed to solve an internal logic issue that I’ve been working on for some time, so I’m full steam ahead putting down about 1k words a day.

Rough drafts are the hardest part of writing for me and I think it’s because of how labor intensive free writing is. Being creative isn’t easy, despite what many people thing and that’s all free writing is. It’s letting yourself go into full creative mode and put your story down on the page. It’s the moment where you realize, I can literally write anything I want. That thought is liberating, but it’s also terrifying. See, the problem isn’t writing the words, it’s making sure those word aren’t terrible.

Later drafts aren’t so bad. Editing is a different beast, and to me, it seems like it must use a different part of your brain. I could sit and edit for five hours straight, no problem. But that creative free writing is draining and after an hour to an hour and a half, I’m just beat.

Something different about book 2 I’ve noticed is my approach to the drafting. When I wrote book 1, I wrote it in order. Chapter 1, then chapter 2, then 3, etc. I think I did myself a big disservice doing that as there were a few times where I realized what I had wasn’t working, so I had to go back 2-3 chapters and start over, effectively scrapping upwards of a whole week’s worth of work. To be fair, at the time I think I needed to write that way, in order to realize that it didn’t work for me. My approach has been different in book 2, where I’m writing scenes in separate files and while I have a loose idea of the structure in my head, I’m going to get all of the rough draft scenes down, then I’ll go about organizing them in the best way. What interests me most about this new approach is that it sort of happened organically. I never decided to abruptly change how I was doing this, I just all of a sudden realized I had a collection of files named things like, “Alina & Kai – Discussion of problem” instead of a collection of chapters. I think this is a much better approach to things, but I’ll follow up when I figure out if that’s actually the case ;).