Lately, I’ve been making terrific progress with the first prequel to Tempest. I had 35k words down in semi-edited prose, the story arc was planned out, the characters were documented, there were three lovely plot twists, and a strong wrap-up. And then two unrelated things happened.
The first was we went on holiday. But the laptop stayed at home. Of course I made notes on my phone, but most of those notes concerned the not-yet-formed second Tempest prequel. My point is there was no serious writing, and that’s as it should be, on holiday. Though there was a lot of reading, and that’s also as it should be.
The second thing was not long after returning home I became unwell and spent three days flat on my back doing nothing but being ill. As I faded in and out of recsleep (that’s short for recovery sleep) little bits (bytes?) of information got pushed around my brain by a small section running on auto. But when I woke up this morning, at least 75% recovered, and after my brain had dumped the weirdest dream from its core memory, all the work that little section had been doing was there for me to mull over.
And yeah, I didn’t like the way the first (as yet unnamed) prequel was going. The start was good, and it had a strong second act. But somewhere along the journey it had lost its way. So I saved the WIP as file version 2, deleted 3,073 words, and shifted another 2,410 words to an archive which I may use again.
And now I’ve dumped the baggage I need to make what’s left of the WIP into a sharper, leaner, more focussed story. I need to not get side-tracked into unnecessary areas.