Writing a Book for the Second Time

Blog Post No. 455

I’ve been working on the fifth novella, Snow from a Distant Sky, for a couple of weeks now and I have to say, I’ve enjoyed getting back into writing. I’ve been editing since I finished Break/Interrupt last September. I went right from editing the fourth novella into editing the Invasion Novel. I kind of wish I would have forced myself to write a short story or two in between the two big edits. Not just because I need to get back to working on shorts in general, but as a bit of a pallet cleanser. I had all kinds of plans to write some shorts and wasn’t able to get it done.

I can’t change the past, though. Not yet. Instead, I’m focusing on getting the first draft of Snow done in a timely manor while keeping pacing and length in mind. Like I mentioned last week, I plan to keep this novella a little shorter. That’s easier said than done considering I tried and failed to do the same thing with the last two novellas. For now, I feel like I’m managing to move forward at a fairly brisk pace and I may be able to get close to that goal.

That being said, it’s been strange starting a story over again from scratch. As I also said last week, Snow is a story that I’ve had on the back burner since 2004. I had the idea for it some time before that (my memory is too fuzzy to say when exactly). Back then, I did a lot of starting stories and not getting very far. It would be good for me to write more than a single page before I dropped off and left the story to languish on my hard drive.

Snow was one of those stories that I actually came back to more than once. There was something about the character and world that stuck with me. I would add a line across the page to delineate where I was starting again and knock out a few more paragraphs. I didn’t get very far, but I did rewrite some of it a few times. Since the story stayed with me so much, it was one of the ideas that I wanted to try again when I started writing for real back in the early Adventure Worlds Press days.

When I started working on the Novellas, I thought that the original Snow story could be a cool entry in the series. I was pretty intimidated by what I had already written in that old document, though, so I put it on hold. Now that I have to actually write the thing, I wasn’t sure if I should even dig up that old document or not. I’ve had the story in my head for so long, I probably don’t remember it right anymore.

I decided to just start from scratch and let my fuzzy memory be the guide. I didn’t want to feel locked into the old writing since this book is part of a series. That, and I’m a much better writer than I was back then. It’s been weird to not look over the old story, but it’s also a little exhilarating to be carving a new path with an old idea. It’s an issue I’m going to have to take a look at again when I finally dust off Pilot and decide if I’m going to rewrite it all or just fight my way though some really rough edits.  Either way, it’s been really fun to get into writing again, and it’s going to be nice to finally finish a story that has occupied space in my head for fifteen years.