Taking the Hard Road

An article by Karen    2 Comments

Due to the hiccup I’ve experienced over the last few days where Mirror Image is concerned, I’ve decided to do myself a favour and pull back from that manuscript for a short time. I need to let the information I’ve received from the reader and helpful friends on the internet to sink in for a while, without formally doing anything with it. At least I haven’t let the “hiccup” stop me in my tracks. I’m still passionate about Mirror Image and August might see me return to this manuscript, September at the latest.

In the meantime, I will continue working on the plan for the trilogy. At this stage, I have loose concepts for all three books, a general idea of the two threads that will span the entire trilogy and a very firm history rolling around my mind. With this in mind, I have turned my attention to building book one from the ground up. The storyline and characters for book one are well known to me, so this will be relatively easy. My biggest decision will be what changes I want to make…especially to the characters. I was thinking about this on the train this morning and have decided that I will NOT use my previous notes/plan/profiles, I will literally start again. I know my decision will take me along the hard road because using what I already have would be the easy, logical option, but I believe taking the easy road has been my mistake in the past and now I’m willing to start again and do it better because I have evolved as a writer since I first planned and wrote this story.

I have devised my own system, which is a bit like the Snowflake Method in as much as I start with basic information and build from there in small steps. I might go into this in more detail at a later stage, when I know how well it works. I began the process, in earnest, this morning. When the process is finished for book one, I’ll do the same for books two and three.