Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Timeline Shenanigans

I basically had two books in limbo for about a month.  One was at 40k and the other at about 37k.  I'm sure you're wondering which one was Universis.  Well, it was the one with the lower wordcount.  Sorry!

Man, how do I get myself into these situations?  Like, what am I doing?  I am great at sitting down and writing.  NaNoWriMo taught me that I can just write, write, write when I need to.  But then, inevitably, something comes to bar my path.

In one of the books I got stuck on a certain scene and I couldn't figure out how to fix it.  I would rewrite it a dozen different ways in my mind and none of them seemed right.  In the end, I knew what I wanted to happen in the scene, when it was all over, so I ended up sort of starting backwards and working my way up to the end result.

In the case of Universis, it was all the timeline switching that was doing me in.  When moving back and forth between three timelines is too much for the AUTHOR to keep track of, you have to wonder what the reader is going to think of all of it.  That's what beta readers are for, right?  Will they be able to keep up?  Only time will tell.

I'm happy to report that I am past my limbo and I've got my mojo back.  All it required was having 4 free hours to just sit down and pull on all my tangled threads.  Now I'm even more excited for what's coming up in the last Five Tribe's book, so I guess it was a good thing?


That's what I tell myself, anyway.

So yeah, I'm currently at 53,000ish words and while it's not as far as I wanted to be by April, at least I'm not lost in a mess of tangled timelines anymore.  I can't believe I'm almost halfway through, guys!!!  Let's pray I can get the latter half done a wee bit faster, huh?