Scotch, Mead and a Clove...

Well, two out of three, anyway. I don't smoke often, and especially not when it sounds like a really good idea right now.

So, thanks to some very nice people who are more astute than I, I've discovered that I blew my timeline and added an extra day to the outline of The Moonstone Cup. It's not the end of the world - although there will be a couple more stealth edits to earlier chapters when Chapter 13 goes up, which I had been hoping to avoid - but is an interesting lesson. This is different than any writing I have done.

It has been about a decade since my last creative writing of any consequence. Since then I have been an undergraduate student, a professional technical writer, and a working computer programmer and designer/developer who has to write documentation, project proposals and test analyses as a matter of course. I also work on the side in other contexts that require a certain amount of technical/factual writing. I have a standard methodology: I create a skeleton that somewhat resembles a traditional outline, I research, I write. If the skeleton requires revision, I revise, then I do it all over again. I keep doing that until I'm satisfied with the final product.

That doesn't work with fiction. It especially doesn't work with serial fiction.

The loss of a day in The Moonstone Cup is probably the least damaging consequence of applying my technical approach to my writing. I have had to throw my outline away and rewrite at least twice, and I've done myriad little tweaks and revisions. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but I am writing this as a serial, which means that if I make a significant change to what is already published I'm rewriting out from underneath people. The more I've tried to avoid that, the more I've had to do it. I like to think that the story is reasonably tightly plotted and the core themes (which I will talk about more when the story's done and I feel more comfortable giving people a tour behind the proscenium) come through clearly. Nevertheless, I do feel like I've screwed up.

So, lessons learned? Well, good editing help is a must. That seems obvious, but there is a difference between any editing - which is what is, of necessity, pounded in in this hobby - and good editing. Beyond that, I think maintaining a reference timeline might be a lot more useful than a skeleton or outline. I am also contemplating writing the last chapter of whatever I do next first and then working backward.

Point to all this? There is no point, I suppose, except to talk a little bit about the things that the wonderful people who've been good enough to read my work have taught me. Thank you all. I hope the rest of my current story and all of the next one are as good as you all deserve.

And now I'm going outside for a smoke.