Mix It Up

Losing perspective is the biggest challenge I encounter with this project. Without anyone else to consistently bounce ideas off of, I can easily get lost in a direction that would kill the overall story. I do have an editor who I bring in when each book is done, and he combs through it with a keen eye for errors and narrative flow. I'm lucky to have this guy doing his thing, but unfortunately he only comes in at the end of the creative process. This can lead to uncomfortable situations; let me give you an example -

When I gave my editor a working draft of "Shadow Play" to go over, his initial feedback was painfully revealing. He loved the story, and proceeded to go over the narrative and all the things he liked about it - before I had to stop him. He was actually describing a completely different story than the one I thought I had written. When we sat down and went through it page by page, I was able to see it through his objective eye. At best, it required an interested reader to fill in a lot of gaps with assumptions and educated guesses, and at worst it was just plain confusing. I ended up redoing "Shadow Play" from scratch. No revising of pages here and there, or fiddling with the text - I completely rewrote the whole damn story. So if you're curious - yes there is a completed alternate version of "Shadow Play" that has never been to print. I'm sure it'll make an interesting bootleg one day.

The lesson I learned from this is to step back from my project as often as possible and work on other things. Getting too engrossed in the story can lead to developing dangerous blind spots that obstruct seeing obvious narrative gaps and inconsistencies.

#Inktober