As everyone in my writing groups is aware (I sigh a lot during meetings), I am in the midst of a massive revision of my dark fantasy/horror novel, HH*. I first came up with the idea for the novel in 2005, and have been working on it sporadically since then, but it wasn’t until NaNoWriMo 2014 that it actually came together into a full manuscript.

I never plan my zero drafts in advance. I have a general concept of my characters (who generally have settled into themselves by 10 or 20k in), and only a vague concept of my plot (I generally know the start, and then the end, and then everything is just a blurry mess in the middle), and then I start to write and figure the rest of it out as I go. It’s great in terms of forcing my brain to figure things out on the fly, and allowing me the maximum amount of flexibility in terms of getting from A to Z.

It’s not great for producing zero drafts. My zero drafts are, quite honestly, disasters. (I’d even go so far as to say if you’ve ever read a draft of mine that was decent and reasonably smooth and I told you it was a zero draft, I was lying. It’s always at least a point five draft before other people see it.)

When I finished HH, I was really excited about it. The worldbuilding was inconsistent, the setting was thin at best, and the characters wandered around a little bit before they finally settled into their selves, but I was really passionate about the story I was telling, and I felt there was a ton of potential in the worldbuilding to create something special. HH is the … fourth** zero draft novel I’ve completed, and the first one where I looked back at it and went “actually, yeah, even after finishing it I’m still super passionate about this story”.

Since 2014, I’ve had a couple of false starts on the revisions. I kept trying, and then petering out, and getting started, and feeling overwhelmed, and resolving to do it this time, and getting distracted. Also video games. I played a lot of video games***.

Then I had my kid. I don’t know how it works for other people, but yikes, did having a kid ever put my free time into perspective. Before the kid, I felt like I had as much time as I needed to write, and consequently, I never wrote, or I wrote without being focused on it, or I planned a lot to write and then did something else instead, or I didn’t plan to write at all, or I flew around in World of Warcraft making raven noises and swooping in on everyone’s herb nodes. You know, important stuff.

But since the kid? HOLY SHIT THESE NEXT FIFTEEN MINUTES MIGHT BE THE ONLY FIFTEEN MINUTES I GET FOR THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON GET THEE TO THY KEYBOARD.

So my priorities have shifted. I’ve been putting a lot of work and a lot of words into the revision. The original draft of the novel went 80k****, and I added some bonus scenes afterwards to finish it out at just over 100k.

This revision, which I’m comfortable calling a first draft***** and letting other people read, is currently at 30k, and there’s so much story left to tell that I’m giving serious thought to splitting the damn thing in half. But we’ll see how the story unfolds, and we’ll see who needs what from whom, and when.

Here’s the hook as it stood a few months ago:

The last thing Asheni remembers before passing out is the mysterious object in her palm, the swarm of something eldritch and unidentifiable flowing toward her, and the blinding pain in her arm. She wakes up lacking all three of these things, as though they never happened–but all the same, everything else has changed.

Now her twin brother won’t speak to her, her partner is looking for answers to questions he shouldn’t know exist, and no one in the village, including the children, will make eye contact with her. The Seer is prophesying the end of the world again, which normally would be something Asheni would ignore–but they’re starting to lose contact with the surrounding cities.

Asheni has to balance the supernatural demands of her job in the present, the threat of her past coming to light, and a very uncertain future both for her, and for the people she cares about.

There’s definitely some edits that need to happen here. For instance, the bit about no one making eye contact her is interesting narrative. If one of the main character has to navigate everything when no one will look her in the eye? That’s a big deal. Ask me if it’s in the original draft of the novel. Spoiler alert: it’s not.

Oh, well, it must be in the revision I’m working on now? Hell no.

I literally made it up for the hook because I thought it sounded cool. And it does sound cool, so I should try and work it in. But as of right now, it’s not in there.

Same with the bit about the Seer prophesying the end of the world. It should be in the actual manuscript, but as of right now, it’s not. It’s actually part of two entirely separate subplots (‘the end of the world is coming’ & ‘the end of the world is not coming’) that I need to weave throughout the narrative. Neither of these subplots are directly pushed forward by the main characters–it’s more like the main characters end up sandwiched between both narratives.

And that isn’t even getting into the matter of the referenced ‘supernatural job’. I’m gonna hang off on discussing that one for a while, though. I’m testing out something in the first draft where the reader is about six chapters in before they finally figure out wtf everyone has been doing, so I need to see if that works before I commit to whether or not it’s going into the hook.

For what it’s worth, I think that’s been one of the hardest parts for me so far–figuring out how to properly seed the narrative. What needs to show up where, when do the secrets get revealed, how do the secrets get revealed? Who knows what, and how do they talk about it?

The original draft of the manuscript was completely in Asheni’s head. I used third person limited past tense, and we only followed Asheni. But then, after the draft was finished, and I was adding a few extra chapters to flesh things out, I got into a wierd headspace where I was writing flashback chapters in italic’d present tense.

When I got into this draft of the story, I figured I’d give it a go in present tense and see what happened–and I expanded the viewpoint characters to include three additional people as well as Asheni. I think it’s telling a better story now–but I know it’ll require extra work to ensure that each of the four voices is stylistically consistent. (That’ll probably be my second draft–physically dividing the story into the four parts, and editing start to finish, voice by voice.)

So that’s where I’m at with this. It’s an unfortunately slow slog, at least in part because this is the largest revision I’ve ever tackled. But I’ll get there eventually.

And I’ll try to keep the sighing to a minimum, at least while I’m out in public.

*working (acronym) title.

**I had to pause and count on my fingers.

***It hurts my feelings to use the past tense there, but accuracy is important.

****Not all written during NaNoWriMo. I only eked out a victory.

*****I typed in ‘one draft’ here, since I thought that was went after ‘zero draft’, and yikes, was it wrong-looking.