Starting Now I'm Starting Over

There comes a time in every writer's life where they want to carefully unplug their laptop and then chuck it across the room.

Well, I'm only guessing. But for several weeks, I've stared at this particular section of my book and just wanted to catch it on fire, to throw it out the window and then stomp on it until it was dust.

Of course, my laptop is new and then I wouldn't be able to watch Netflix, so I have managed to hold off on said destruction. Instead, I like to slam my fist against my flimsy desk and then give the computer screen a good glare, an If Looks Could Kill sort of thing.

Luckily for me and my fist, a super awesome friend of mine recently read Book 1. Afterwards, she provided loads of comments and suggestions that finally enabled me to see what direction I need to take to get this book to be what I want it to be:

I need to start over.

Of course, I'm not really starting over. I'm going to be using a lot of scenes from the previous drafts, tweaking them as necessary. I am rewriting the beginning, but I've been planning to do that all along. Alex has always been on the plane to her aunt's house, thinking back to the event that got her there in the first place. Now i'm thinking about starting the book maybe the day after that event, so that she's still in her hometown and so she might be able to interact more with the people she's leaving behind. I really just want to have an awkward scene of her being driven to the airport by her (ex?) best friend. We'll see how that goes.

I also decided to read over my Nano project for a bit of comic relief as I dealt with a sore throat this weekend. Maybe it was the medicine I was taking, but I found the draft hilariously terrible, like those singers who go on American Idol and look like they really believe they can sing wonderfully, even though everyone else is doing their best not to cover their ears. It was like past me really believed that I was telling a story in an interesting way, while some kind of subconscious Randy Jackson was shaking his head at how terrible it actually was.

Needless to say, that story is on the back burner. It's really for the better, as I still can't decide if the  main character should really be pregnant or not (the draft is written so that she's not pregnant). That decision obviously would take the book in very different directions, so it's something I'll sleep on.

Instead I'll focus on Alex and Book 1, and the companion books that I want to write from the points of view (point of views?) of the other characters in that book. I still can't decide which one to do first, but I obviously have time to figure that out now. Maybe I'll lay out the choices in another post. Or maybe I won't. Life's a mystery.