Wednesday, June 24, 2009

The End is Near!

The end of Tiger Eyes, that is.

Yay! I've got about 7k words left and the first draft is done, Done, DONE!

Let's recap on the rather arduous journey on this one, shall we?

I started this story over a year ago - in May, 2008. Eden's Pass had just been released and I thought Diego's story needed to be told. All fired up, I sat down and dutifully filled out my WIP Notebook from characters, to plot, to turning points, to timeline.

Inspired, I sat at the laptop and got right to work.

And the story fizzled by page 30.

Damn.

Over on Absolute Write, I vented about the frustration over having this great story idea (or so I thought) and having the book hit the wall at page 30. Lo and behold, I found myself surrounded by great suggestions for getting past the page 30 block. One particularly intriguing idea was to write the ending first and work backward, that way I knew where the story ended up, so I just had to figure out how to get Diego and Gabby there.

I wrote the final chapter and next to last chapter. It worked.

Then it didn't.

By now I was at about August. I shelved Tiger Eyes and dragged out After the Storm. Several months passed since I finished that book, and I was already about two revisions in, so I figured I'd give it a last read through and send it off.

I worked on other projects, but seemed to run into the same problem. I'd outline and characterize and plot and the story would die at or around page 30.

Then NaNoWriMo rolled around. Perfect. Maybe under pressure, I'd finish Diego's story. Unfortunately, I also had the inspiration for another Montgomery book. Between both ideas, I hit the 50k word mark for NaNo. But neither book was finished, but at least I was unblocked.

Long story short, I finished Devil in Disguise, got about 3/4ths of the way through Angel of Darkness, and then, dove back into Tiger Eyes. Along the way I realized that the problem was the outlining procedure. I'm not an outliner. I'm a pantser. The outlining killed any creativity I had toward whatever story I tried to write. So, I scrapped all but the character sheets (which are pretty damn handy, if you want the truth.) And what do you know?

Tiger Eyes was back in the game. And now, about 3 weeks after I dove back into it, I'm thisclose to finished. Yay!

And on that note, it's time to get back to it. Now that I'm so close, I just want to wrap it up. So I think that's exactly what I'll do...

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