Friday, May 8, 2020

Memories of a Time Long Forgotten

So, as I finished Memories of What Never Was a bit ago, I found myself all hyped up to continue the story, rather than following my plan to finish up the first draft of the story I started for NaNo last year, called Carrying the Weight of the World.  So, that one is going to wait for a bit while I finish up the rough draft of the second part of this trilogy thingy I started way, WAY too long ago.

So a couple years ago I started the first draft of this story.  And back then I had it titled Shadows of What Might Have Been.  It's a phrase that I used a few times during Memories of What Never Was, and I kind of liked the sound of it.  But it doesn't really have much to do with what happens in the story.  So I figured I'd stick with the memories motif and change the title to Memories of a Past Long Forgotten, which is a lot more indicative to what actually happens in the story.

The main reason I stopped working on it was that there were some pieces missing, and it wasn't coming together the way I wanted it.  I back burnered it and went back to editing the two stories that were nearly complete.  But I've been thinking a lot since that time about what I would do to fix it, and what more it needed to make it all work.  And last week I started reading through what I had written (almost 100k words, about 2/3 of the story) and making a few edits, as though I were working on a second draft.  I added in a lot of new chapters that were needed.  Cut out about an equal number of other chapters that weren't working, and ideas that I didn't like, and now I'm ready to finish up with the finale. 

Anyway, I'm a LOT happier with this story now that I've done some extensive fixing on it.  And to be honest, a lot of what I already had written wasn't all that bad, either.  Most of what I didn't like, some pretty bad character decisions I'd made, took some doing to remove and change, but now I'm pretty excited for how well these edits have turned out, and pumped up to write the rest of it.  So, I'm expecting that in the next couple of months I'm going to have a full first draft to work with.  And hopefully it won't take me 5 years to edit this one like it did the first one.

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