full steam ahead
*warning - post being made under the influence of a very, very large iced coffee plus a cup of regular coffee. And two donuts*
So Larissa was talking the other day about having an ‘off’ day since I had the Syd novella to work on. Normally, with a full manuscript, neither of us have an off day, since one of us can be working through the main storyline while the other moves along on the subplots. But since the novella doesn’t have a subplot that doesn’t work.
Still, I was trying to figure out just why this novella was so, I’ll do my scene, in order and pass it back to you, when that rarely happens. The in-order thing. I mean, we’d had to write a short synopsis, so we knew where the novella would go (minus a few of those things I’d spoken of the other day)…and then I realized what the deal was.
With both my own stuff and with Syd’s (I don’t know if this happens to Larissa with her own stuff, but I’m suspecting yes), when I (we) turn in proposals, we don’t just have the first three chapters written. No way. When I sold my HTH proposal, it was 65 pages, but I had 150 written. After chapter 3, nothing in order, of course, but I had other, crucial scenes that helped me to form those first chapter. Same with the Syd books - when we handed in the UTS proposal, we had at least 100 pages. Same with SBTH. But with this novella…not so much. We had one chapter. So now, on page 94, we’ve finally gotten to that point we’re we’re seeing it all mapped out.
We’re at the point where I can start a scene, can see where it’s going to end. So what I’ll do in that case is show Larissa the rough stuff I’ve got, complete with all the blank spots plus how I envision how the scene will end. She can then build on the ending even though she doesn’t know everything that’s happening in my scene and move on to write her own scene. So yeah, we’re at that point where, if this was a full novel, we’d write some crazy number of pages in just this weekend alone because we’d hit that point. Which is really a lot of fun and doesn’t normally require extra coffee either.
A crazy system which shouldn’t work out, but it does. Really. 
Okay, so for Sven’s count:
Wednesday: 7 pages plus revised a TON on the HTH ms
Yesterday: 3 pages plus revised even more on the HTH ms
Today so far: 9 pages (YAY for coffee) and plan to rewrite 2 crucial scenes for HTH. I have extra donuts if I need them.
Oh, and Sydney’s official website launched! Go check it out…it’s really cool! Bekke did an awesome job. :D (oh, spooky that REM’s Losing My Religion came on my playlist as I was typing Bekke’s name!)
Steph T.
