Neverland Book Progress

January 2018

A pain in my ass. Let’s get started talking about this. Okay, so, according to my writing schedule, I was supposed to pop out the story outline for Neverland in October so that it’d be ready for National Novel Writing Month, also known as, Nanowrimo. Clearly, that ain’t happen. Let me talk about that.

This book has been dragging…

*update: I do think now I have a much better grip on this book now that I’ve added some flesh to its bones because back in October when I was outlining this book, throwing my laptop through the window seems like a better idea. ???

April 5, 2018

I have revamped my writing schedule and goals and am merrily on my way to the 20,000 wordmark for the rough draft of this book. Now, you may be asking, what is this book even about? All right, doing my research about what is popular nowadays in the book Market I came across a popular fantasy series called blood and snow. It was an author’s story loosely based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

April 9, 2018

Apparently, I don’t know this writing software as well as I wanted to believe. When I was messing around with it (because I had become very certain that all of the words in scenes that hadn’t yet been worked into the story were not being counted in the overall word count), I stumbled across where I had gone wrong and poof, I was at 20,000 words!! *praise dance* for now for now, I have set my rough draft deadline of 50,000 words for May 31st. I pop out between 5 and 6 hundred words everyday for neverland because most days that’s about all my mind can really handle.

Putting the story together with all of its characters and magical aspects has legitimately given me a headache. So I opted for a longer period of time to make the rough draft happen because it gives me more time to really flesh out the world and come up with solutions and rules to the magical elements that I have added to this Peter Pan story. I never realized that writing a fantasy novel was quite this intense (as I’ve never done it before), but the more I really thought about it, the more sense it made. You literally have to think up a whole new society, a planet, with its own geography, plant life, and animals, its own rules, how things work… it’s been a lot, but such a rewarding and educational experience. I’ve rearranged the deadlines on other fantasy novels I’ve been outlining and planning to account for the amount of time and energy it’ll take to do more world building.

June 2, 2018

As I close in on the 50,000 word rough draft, I feel more and more uncertain that I should even be writing this story, but at the same time, I’m a little in love with it and proud of what I’ve come up with. A story of magic and love, destiny and desire, heartbreak and betrayal…all in the mystical world of Neverland.

I was listening to my favorite writing podcast a few weeks ago when I finally realized that Neverland is not a story that focuses on one or two people, but is more of a Once Upon a Time kind of story, where there are a lot of characters and the story cannot happen without any of them. As I did get my Creative Writing degree with a focus in poetry, I have not had a whole lot of formal instruction on novel-writing and have been doing my own research about it because…this shit is hard!

There are many days that I just want to tap out on this story because…the more characters you add, the more complex the story is, the more characters you have to juggle. This feels like a word puzzle of a thousand and one pieces and somehow, with the help of hours of research, I creep towards having a workable rough draft. If I didn’t really think about it before, I truly believe now that fantasy and science fiction are probably the most difficult genres to write for. That’s probably why it took 87 years for J.K. Rowling to write each Harry Potter book. You are literally building a whole new world for readers to step through that needs to feel as real as reality. I vaguely remember doing the rough draft for Take Me In during National Novel Writing Month and do not remember it being nearly this much of a pain in the ass to get through.

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