I figured I'd work on something that I already had an outline for. I'd finished an outline for a new M/F fantasy romance a couple of years ago, and thought I'd probably write that. Romance is fun to write and comparatively easy for me. But I'd been poking at my incomplete notes for Birthright, the sequel to Silver Scales. I finished Scales in 2006 and trunked it when I was unable to figure out where I was going with the sequel.
alinsa had read the manuscript last year and kept reminding me that it existed. If I could finish a rough outline of Birthright, I decided, I'd work on that during November instead.By the last week of October, I hadn't gotten very far on outlining. But on the last two days of the month, I put some time into it and finished around midday on the 31st.
So I've been writing Birthright again this month.
It's weird writing characters that I haven't written in eight years, and weirder having an outline for them when I was always making it up as I went along before. It does mean that when I get stuck, I can go look at the outline and see what I need to cover.
It's a much rougher draft than my drafts usually are. It includes things like "[Experimentation goes here. Include flirting]" and notes to myself to go back and change things later: "[Re-write the last scene with character giving her version of events to a third party, instead of character thinking about what she'll tell when asked]".
I was doing really well with it for the first six days of November, and then I went to Contra last week and lost all my momentum. Still, my word count for November is over 12,000 now. Enough that this is a thing that is happening, not "I wrote a page and gave up again."
Maybe I won't love the sequel as much as I did the original. I think that's been my biggest worry since I quit back in 2006; that it wouldn't live up to its potential. But the book I don't write won't live up to its potential, either. Time is going to pass either way.
I'm gonna finish this story.
