Tag Archives: rewriting

Two Novels at One Time… An Interesting Challenge!

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to write two novels in 2012. I could not decide which to write first so I’ve decided to write them both, more or less, at the same time.

What I’m doing is this…

One day I work on one novel and the next day I work on the other. It seems to be working so far.

But it is an interesting challenge. One of the novels is written in third person narrative. The other is written in first person. One novel is a paranormal romance and the other is a bit of a social commentary. One of the novels is titled FINDING VERITY. The other I’m referring to as CURRENT NOVEL because I haven’t come up with a title yet. Unless something happens to change my mind I plan on self-publishing both, just like I self-published WINDFALL.

I’m up to the challenge and consider it to be a kind of experiment. I’m wondering if I’ll be able to keep the two stories straight or if this will end up being too confusing.

I’d love to hear from other writers who have written two novels at the same time.

I’ll take all the helpful suggestions you can throw my way!

The Transition between FINISHING & STARTING a Writing Project

When I finished WINDFALL I really looked forward to getting started on my next big project. What I wasn’t ready for was the difficulty in making the transition between one project and the next.

For several months I honed WINDFALL, reading it over and over, finding little mistakes like omitted periods, and misused commas, scenes out-of-order, pronoun confusion, etc.  After awhile I found myself longing for the high of creativity.

But, when WINDFALL was finished, I found myself stuck in a weird place. It is darn hard to be creative when your brain is looking for punctuation problems. I found I could not get past chapter one. I kept polishing and polishing and polishing… I had returned to the final editing steps of WINDFALL without realizing what I was doing.

One way I have dealt with this… When I finish my writing for the day, I make sure I stop in the middle of a scene. That way, when I return to the project, I’m more inclined to work with the creative side of my brain. It makes it easier to ignore the urge to rewrite.

Do you have any “tricks” that you use to get you past this difficult transition period?

The Future of the WINDFALL Screenplay

The novel, WINDFALL, was based on a screenplay I’d already written with the same title.

Now that the novel is published on Amazon, I’ve decided to “tweak” the screenplay and submit it to AMAZON STUDIOS. Who knows, maybe some day the story will be made into a feature, too.

Why am I tweaking the script? Well, when I wrote the novel, the story changed and some of those changes are definite improvements to the original story. So, I’m returning to the screenplay to incorporate those changes.

Follow the progress on this blog, my “writing journey”!

1938 book : HOW TO MAKE GOOD MOVIES