This has all been on my mind since a few weeks ago when I posted an article announcing the upcoming release of my first short story anthology along with an update on the sequels for The Beast Hunter and Lost Under Two Moons. While I was happy to announce that the anthology and the follow-up to The Beast Hunter were both going well, I was less enthusiastic about commenting on the condition of the Lost Under Two Moons sequel.
Let me say up front that I have definitely been working on this piece for a while now. I started the sequel to Lost Under Two Moons back in 2012, and had been steadily adding hours and words to the project ever since. In fact, I’d recently passed the 55,000 word mark, and while the manuscript was still a little short for a full length novel, I was planning on finishing up the climax in the next month or so and then beginning the revision process. That was the plan.
What’s actually happened is that I’ve steadily gotten fewer and fewer words done on this project each week for the last six months. While I do often experience fluctuating output on various projects depending on what I have ideas for, the Lost Under Two Moons sequel was consistently the poorest performing project. It eventually got to the point that I hated working on this project and yet couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. All I knew was that I never had any ideas, and that working on it was never as much fun as writing on any of my other projects. In short, I had come to resent this story, and no amount of either time away from it or forcing myself to work on it was helping.
In the end, I had to take some of my own advice. A month or two ago I had posted an article for writers about how to tell when it was time to completely start a project over. I remembered writing the article, but I couldn’t remember what my advice had been. I’ll admit that I felt a little silly going to my blog to read one of my own articles to get help, but I’m glad that I did.
In the article, I’d mentioned that an author should start a project over when the premise for the story was broken. With that in mind, I took a long, hard look at my problem-project, and realized that my premise was in fact very broken. Everything from the set-up to the climax was wrong. I’d just been working on it for so long that I couldn’t see that I was riding a train going nowhere.
Since making this discovery, I’ve really taken a step back from the project and asked myself what would need to happen to repair my relationship with this failing story. In the end, I’ve decided that I need to start the project over with a new premise and plot. While no writer looks forward to starting a project over again, there is a bright side here. I’ve got 55,000 words of material that I can cut, shape, and steal from to create my new story.
Even more importantly, I’m excited to work on this project again, something that I haven’t felt in over a year. It’s still a little embarrassing to admit that I made the mistake of working on the wrong story for so long, and I know that fans of Lost Under Two Moons will be disappointed to hear that the sequel won’t be coming out as soon as we were all hoping. All I can say is that the version of the story that I had been working on would not have been up to either my standards or those of my fans, and I think we all would have been disappointed if I had published it. I hope that my fans will support me as I continue to work and strive to write the best stories that I am able to, and that my students will appreciate that every writer has permission to make mistakes and get better.
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