Blog Chain: Writing Project WIP's

It was my turn to think of a question, and I was curious about everybody's writing life:

Write about your next writing project. What is the genre? Is is one you've written before or is it a new venture? Do you have it all figured out or is it just a germ of an idea? What did you learn from your latest writing project that will make this one even better?

My next writing projects:

• co-writing a YA time travel novel that's more of a coming of age with sci-fi elements
• re-drafting an MG radioactive mutant hero novel about war and the quest for peace
• beginning a first draft of a YA paranormal romance containing themes of societal stigma, death, and resurrection

After working on two YA paranormal romances, one more playful, the other darker, I hit sort of a wall in my writing. Why? Revision time! I hate it. 

Well, hated, past tense. 

The New Year's Revisions Conference was exactly what I needed. I got so many great ideas, including the fabulous Save the Cat 15 beats for screenwriters which Christine Fonseca recommended. 

On goodreads

Bought the e-book of Save the Cat, skipped ahead to the chapter on beats, and never looked back. In one night, I re-outlined my MG radioactive mutant hero novel so that even I can't wait to see what happens. It's going to be fun to write! 

The reason revision always kicked my butt before was my lack of structure. I was just sort of reading and rereading over and over again, looking for things to fix. Sometimes I'd read a blog post by another writer about one particular aspect of story and I'd revise for that. But there was no order to it. I just kept hoping this round of revision would make my story shiny enough, whatever that meant. Christine's post on revision was eye-opening for me. Human beings love our freedom, but we also crave structure. 

It's only when we have boundaries to push against that we can truly be creative.  

I learned from my last few novels that I'm ready. I've been working on my voice, my style, my wordsmithing for years now. I'm ready to implement a solid structure in my novels, and I've chosen the screenwriting structure by Blake Snyder to do that.

So here is the status of each of my three projects right now:

1) YA time travel I'm co-writing with my sister: about a third of the way done with the rough draft. It's still exciting. It's still fun. And we're just getting into the Fun and Games beat.

2) MG radioactive mutant hero novel: I've got a killer new outline to which I need to add specific scenes, then buckle down and write. My excitement for this one has been rekindled by the New Year's Revisions Conference and Save the Cat.

3) YA Paranormal Romance: These tend to come from dreams I've had. I often start them and then let them sit for a while. That might be the fate of this one as I've already got a lot on my plate. But I'm fleshing it out whenever a new idea comes to mind, and I hope I'll get to write it as soon as I'm done with the first drafts of 1 and 2.

My challenge as an artist is to focus long enough to get a job done. I've done it six times before, so I know I can do it again.

What are you writing today?

Read all about Christine Fonseca's upcoming projects and don't miss out on her FREE LACRIMOSA and MEA CULPA deal on amazon (only today and tomorrow). 

Tomorrow check out Lisa Amowitz's blog for her works-in-progress/upcoming writing projects.