So, as of today, I’m 75% through the next draft on PubStunt. Cross all your fingers and eyes, I’m hoping this will be the last major revision. The plan is to finish by the end of September. I’m going through all my “lesser” revisions at the moment – stuff like word choices, tenses, changing a few lines here and there, based on the notes I made. When I’m done with that, I’ve got some heftier work to do. There are entire plot points that I’ve removed or am heavily re-working, and there are things I need to weave in, and I need to make sure it still flows. Overall, I’m very optimistic. This is the first time I’ve done such heavy editing on a project, but I see a much bettter book coming out of it.
As long as I can hold myself together long enough to hit the deadline, I’ll start querying in October and hit the ground running on the next project. I’m just not sure what the next project will be, because there are at least three that have potential.
I have the “Pub Stunt” universe, as it lives in my brain. That has Pub Stunt, which I’m working on and Under Contract, which is quite low on written pages, but has a decent amount of ideas that have been simmering in the pot. If I opt to stick with the Pub Stunt universe, I’d work on UC next. I do have two other ideas, but they’re still incredibly fuzzy.
There’s also the Immortal Soap Opera, which is in about the same state UC is in, but with fewer ideas in the pot. But because I’ve already gotten very good feedback on what I have, that is a strong contender for next project.
If I wanted to shift gears dramatically, I started a version of Cinderella from the Prince’s perspective. Think more like Ever After and less the Disney version. I really like what I have there – the first draft is probably 3/4 finished. But I know it’d be a lot of heavy lifting to finish it up and I’m not sure if it’s a sellable idea, so that one might have to sit a while or become something I can throw out there as a freebee.
So while the world is chaotic, so is my writing. But I’m getting there, one day at a time.