WoaW: DRAGONFRUIT Prep Edition

Dvorak Update: Since my last post, I have made definite progress with the demons now inhabiting my keyboard. I no longer quite remember how to type QWERTY, which is good. Less good is the mini-seizures that happen when I get overly excited about what I want to say. (WHERE IS K?! HOW TYPE THIS?! EOHUXUEUCEURCKCTBT!!!) But overall, I have made progress. Hooray! Or, in Dvorak ... Drrpaf!

Hey, remember last month, when I whinged about my WIP and insisted that it would all work out in the same breath? Well, it didn't work out.

I'm still not sure what went wrong. I love WONDERLAND. I love the wonder and the hunger and the gutwrenching INTENSITY of it. But however hard I tried, I couldn't get the magic to happen on paper. The characters were flat. The scenes that were supposed to be gripping were actually just dumb. And after months of desperate scrambling, of writing and rewriting, I finally had to admit it.

WONDERLAND isn't ready. I still don't know why. I believe in the story, and I want to write it. I WILL write it someday. But, well, that day is not today.

The bright side of all this is that I'm now free to tackle Camp NaNoWriMo, the summer session of my favorite writing challenge. This July, I intend to do a page-one rewrite of the first novel I ever finished.* This is a huge project, as the first draft in question weighed in at around 250k.***

And, well, it wasn't very good. I mean, it was GREAT when you take into account that I was fifteen, and it was my first book, and I wrote all 250k of it in a little over nine months. But I had no idea what I was doing, and it shows.

So for this draft, I am doing a COMPLETE RENOVATION of this book. New setting, refocused (and shortened!) plotlines, fresh paint ... the whole shebang. Which means I need to let go of a LOT of preconceptions about this story and build a new, fresh approach.

Which, for me, means clustering. Lots and lots of clustering.†

So I thought I'd share a few of the things I've turned up in my mad quest to figure out this book ... which I'm going to call DRAGONFRUIT online because a) the story involves dragons and b) I think dragon fruit is awesome.

(Not that I've ever tried it. Has ANYONE tried it? I want to try it. It has an awesome name, and it's spiky and oddly colored, which ought to mean it's delicious, right? And ... oh, yeah, the book. Right.)

TEN THINGS THAT MAKE ME WANT TO WRITE DRAGONFRUIT THIS VERY SECOND, AND MAYBE EAT SOME TOO:

1. DRAGONS
2. FEVER
3. PINE TREES
4. SWADDLE
5. TATTERED PAPER
6. FIRST KISS
7. BARE LEGS
8. HEARTHFIRE
9. FULL BELLY
10. ITCH FOR MORE

And with that, I'm off to see if I can dig a little deeper into my first scene before dinner. Until next time!

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* Finished being a relative term. I've obviously never polished a book to shiny, query-ready (not quite) perfection, or I would be querying with it. This is the first book I typed The End on, which is quite a feat and not to be sneezed at.**

** Unless you have hay fever like me. In which case, have a tissue.

*** For those of you who don't speak word count, that's about the length of the fifth Harry Potter book. YEAH, I KNOW.

† I may do a post on my clustering technique in the future. Until then, this is the woman whose course, HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS, got me started. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. (And that's my affiliate link, so anything you buy through it helps me out of my current state of miserable poverty, which is kind of fabulous. But the courses are more fabulous ... which is why I'm so poor to begin with. Well, that and jaw surgery. And mental illness. But I digress.)