Hello, lovely people! It’s been a while since I did one of these. I’ve been working on revising A Compass in the Shadows the last few weeks, and it’s going a lot more slowly than I anticipated. Between deciding to completely change Draea’s arc and adjusting Aurea’s arc and cutting the first two chapters, which meant doing some pretty large rewrites of the few chapters after those, it’s been a ton more work than I expected. This really just feels like more fixing from the mess this book was at the beginning of last year. I know, though, it will absolutely be worth it when I’m done, and the book will be that much better.
I read somewhere that a book is never finished, only abandoned, and that sounds pretty accurate right now. I feel as if I could keep editing this book for the rest of my life and never be satisfied. Even as I finish a chapter, I think of things I want to add or take out or rewrite. At some point, I’ll just have to call it good enough or I’ll be here forever, and I have other things I want to write, too. That said, this draft and these changes I’m making now do feel entirely necessary to make the book as good as it can be. The problem with pantsing my way through the first draft is that it was such a disaster that revising it once wasn’t enough. So that’s really how I’m viewing this, as just another round of me fixing the mess I started with. I feel significantly better about the two books I actually planned out, and I don’t believe either of them will require nearly as much rewriting as this book has.
So while I’m somewhat frustrated by the need to rewrite a third of the book again, I am grateful for the lesson I learned along the way, and the lesson I keep being reminded of: Pantsing is not the answer. Plotting only, please, future me. It will save you many revising headaches.
What I wrote this week
Chapters Six through Ten of A Compass in the Shadows
What I read this week
Mistborn: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
Over the Top by Jonathan Van Ness
A.M. Sӧtemann 