If you actually pay attention to all that garbage on the right hand side of the screen, you may have noticed that I added a Write-O-Meter for a new manuscript, tentatively titled Lady Libertine. This book is a sequel to Living In Sin that's been floating around in my head for the past few months. The heroine, Amelia Manwarren, started out as a villainess in Living In Sin, but before long, I found I enjoyed writing in her voice so much that I couldn't bear to let her go when the story ended. This meant I had to find a way to redeem her at the end of LIS so she could go on to have her own book.
Amelia is definitely not your typical historical romance novel heroine. Far from being a virginal innocent in the dewy bloom of youth, she's a mature twenty-eight years old and newly widowed in the opening scenes of Lady Libertine. She's also, not to put too fine a point on it, promiscuous. Or has been up until she meets her hero, Remy Giroux, a former spy for the French government who has gone into private practice. They meet when Remy is hired to retrieve some blueprints for his client that have been in Amelia's husband's possession since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
I resisted starting Lady Libertine for a long time because I was afraid it would distract me from finishing Living In Sin, but my FanLit experience taught me that working on two projects simultaneously isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it may even be a good thing, for the obvious reason that if you get stuck in one story, you can always switch to working on the other one. And sometimes, it seems changing gears shakes loose ideas and gets the creative juices flowing so you can go back to the other project and pick up where you left off, fresher and more energized than before.
The danger in starting a new project when you haven't completed the first is, of course, that you get so wrapped up in the new project that you completely abandon the old one. And I have to admit, that worries me because I am notorious for starting stories and never finishing them because I get sidetracked by a new story. (Come to think of it, that's my M.O. for life in general. I am the quintessential absent-minded professor type. I start things, get distracted, and forget to finish what I started. No wonder my husband finds me frustrating to live with!)
So I do have to be careful here. I've actually written only the first paragraph of Lady Libertine at this point--not even enough to show up on the meter. And my plan for today is to keep plowing forward with my plot revisions to Living In Sin in the hopes of picking up again from where I left off either late today or early tomorrow. But I wanted to put the meter up there because I decided to take the chance and see if writing my own second project would give me the oomph I need to finish Living In Sin before the final results of the Golden Rose and the preliminary results of CONNections Contest are announced.
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4 comments:
I noticed! I might not have, since the blog posts don't usually get down that far, but on Saturday I tried to update my Write-o-Meter and the link was broken. So I snuck over here to see if yours was broken, too (last time mine went down, they were all down) and yours was :-) But I did a little squee to see you had added it. I think you have enough going on now that you're not going to abandon anything.
But if I'm wrong...I have a bat. I'm not afraid to beat you with it!
As long as the bat has nothing to do with vampires, sounds good :->!
I really hope I don't lose focus and can finish LIS. It's so close. The farthest I've ever gotten in a story since high school, I think. And it definitely helps to have other people reading and wanting me to finish. I've never had that incentive before!
Hi Lainey!
I have more sequels/follow-ups to this book than I know what to do with. Have characters and plots for at least three more books. Story ideas are not my problem, LOL. So it's nice to know editors/agents like that :->.
And yes, I'm glad I got the monkey off my back and that I'm actually moving again on my manuscript. I even finished my plot revisions yesterday. They weren't major, though. Darn thing is still too freakin' long. I found one scene to cut, but I'm hard-pressed to cut anything else. I like it all too much, darn it!
But I should be writing forward, not worrying about revising what's already written. That comes after I finish! (Lacey, got that bat handy?)
Glad you like the idea for Amelia's book. I've been rolling it around in my head for a while and am really savoring it. I admit, it's pretty half-baked at the moment. I have the basic plot idea, but the actual scene-by-scene unfolding of the story is still very unclear. Amelia's such a fun character, though. I'm really going to enjoy writing her.
And God, I WISH I was done with LIS, but no, I'm not. Like you, I'm probably about 75 pages from the end. I had to revise the plot line first, though, before I felt I could write forward. As it turned out, I probably could have just kept writing forward without making the changes. They were relatively minor, anyway.
At the moment, I'm stuck in a love scene. Let's just say those don't come easily for me (pun intended). I hope the story will start flowing a little more smoothly once I get beyond that point!
And keep plugging away on yours, Leigh. I think the most important thing of all in this writing game is to prove to yourself that you CAN finish! And you CAN!
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