Choosing the next book.

I've finished Nearly Human to my satisfaction for the moment.  Put that last surge of effort into it, which I'm proud of, and I think I made it much better in each of the last two drafts.

Sometimes a Dragon has been rewritten, and I'm sending it off to the copyeditor here in town.

So my next step, I think, is to plan out the second book in the Lore series.  Either that or the second book in the Cobb series (Nearly Human.)

1.)  Plan ahead, get the theme down and a rough plot outline.  Try to flesh out the backstory.

2.) Clear enough time away to write a first draft quickly.

3.) Set it aside, then come back to it several times.

THEN:

Pick the second project, and rinse and repeat.

THEN:

Go back to the first project.

And so on.

That's my working process now, which I learned after not doing it that way with Nearly Human.

I thought, when I started, that I could write a book like a blog.  Just wake up every day and do a thousand words, or something.

Doesn't work that way.

I thought, when I started, that I could be clever and snarky, but my main characters need to be underdogs and sympathetic and not clever and snarky.

I need to "feel" that first draft; I need to try not to take too many missteps; and I need to take the time at the end of the process to get it polished and right.

My weaknesses that I can do anything about, as it see it now, are that I need to spend more time on the background details, the little things that make the world real.  Again, I think it would help to visualize the world before I start.

When I actually write, I write quickly, so I can afford to take a little time to plan.  I've always said I don't outline because I discover the plot through writing -- but I just don't think I can afford to do that anymore.

At some point I want to go back to Deviltree -- add a couple of new elements -- and rewrite it from beginning to end.  I was thinking about making it more horror than fantasy, and how I could go about that.

I've gotten very clever lately about inserting secondary stories into an existing plot.  It actually works pretty well, I think, and Deviltree needs a little something more to really make it work.

So there's that, too.

I'm really enjoying the idea that I'm going to be able to do these things....