Tagged: Son of Science Novel

Looking Ahead at 2016

r-avatarIt’s a brand new year, which means it’s time to draw up a plan for our writing.

Son of Music Novel’s first draft is resting quietly in the virtual bottom drawer. Once we’ve forgotten everything we wrote we’ll pick it up again and edit it with fresh eyes, then take it to our critique group.

To help us do that forgetting we’ve begun to spec out Son of Science Novel. We had approximately a day and a half of just sort of staring at each other, trying to remember who had survived the first book in the series and imagine what they might get up to next. Then – BOOM! – the ideas exploded and we’ve started filling up the pages in a new steno pad. Jen’s made her first timeline and her first list of potential character names. Kent’s list of topics to research is growing by the minute. It’s amazingly fun.

Not that it will be fun for our characters. Nope. They’ll hate us, which is how it should be.

Coming into the brainstorming we had some pictures and preliminary notes on two real-world locations that seemed like fruitful story settings. Early ideas seemed to rule them both out, though, much to our chagrin. But now we’ve found a way to work with one, and possibly both of them. Huzzah!

We’d like to think that the brainstorming and outlining won’t take as long as they did for Son of Music Novel. If they keep going at this pace, we should be golden.

Once we get this baby outlined nicely, we’ll switch back to Son of Music Novel and do those edits, and while we’re at it we’ll pull up Music Novel itself and find ways to tie the two narratives together more strongly.

Meanwhile, we’re waiting for good news from the agent who is currently looking at Science Novel. 2016 might just be the year this all takes off.

2015 – That Was The Year That Was

r-avatarIn January of 2015 we wrote up a schedule for our year in writing, and then promptly did not look at it again until just now. Imagine our shock and delight when we discovered that we pretty much stuck to the plan!

  • Novel #5 (aka The Science Novel) is in the hands of an extremely capable agent, and we’re reminding ourselves to be patient as we await a reply
  • Novel #6 (aka Son of Music Novel) is in the can
  • and we have indeed begun brainstorming for Novel #7 (aka Son of Science Novel)

But how did we get here? Let us cuddle up with warm beverages and take a look back at 2015.

January was all about getting to know our new characters.

February saw us chugging through the outlining of Novel #6, and extolling the virtues of writing partnerships.

By March we had most of the kinks worked out of the rough outline we call the Plot Rainbow, and were preparing to move to the next step in our process.

In April we were still in the preparatory phase for the new novel, honing the characters’ voices, and dealing with a (gasp!) disagreement in the Writing Cave.

May brought the actual start of composition. Finally.

In June we were patting ourselves on the back for our deft theme incorporation and thorough world-building.

We spent much of July talking about music. This is Son of Music Novel, so it makes sense. Also, we were 43,000 words in!

By the first week of August that word count had leapt to 72,000 words. Yikes! We talked about our marketing efforts, and also went on a field trip.

Our schedule disruptions continued in September when we attended a writing conference and visited with our good friend and fellow author Reggie Lutz.

In October we were still chugging away on the first draft, encountering only a few minor problems.

November saw completion of the main narrative. We even had time to read through the whole damn thing over Thanksgiving break.

Which brings us up to the present day, December 2015. Son of Music Novel’s first draft is completely complete, ancillary material and all. Sure it’s long, but we’ll worry about that later. For now we’re making plans to see Star Wars again before Kent heads back to work.

Next week we’ll talk about our plans for the upcoming year.

Happy New Year!

Begin Again

r-avatarFinally! The first draft of Son of Music Novel is officially done. We wrapped up the lingering loose ends a few days ago and tucked it away for safekeeping. As we mentioned  a few weeks ago, we prefer to take things to critique group once we’ve sanded off the worst of the imperfections, which means that our new baby is not quite ready for its public debut. It’s all tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk, and needs a bit of a lie down while we work on other things.

Picking up a new project (or revisiting an old one) forces us to focus on something different and drives the details of the newly completed novel from our minds. That way, when we pick it up again, we can look at it with fresh eyes. Obviously we’ll never be unspoiled readers of our own work, but one does what one can.

Our new project will be a sequel to Novel #5, which we cleverly code-named the Science Novel. Most likely it will be known here on the blog by the nom de guerre Son of Science Novel, even after we decide on its real title. We dug up some existing notes on potential directions the sequel could take, reminded ourselves which characters survived the first outing, and looked at the pretty pictures of the not-so-pretty locations we’re taking inspiration from for possible settings. It’s been fun and refreshing to shift gears, and we’re looking forward to a deep dive back into the world we created for Science Novel.

That and watching The Man in the High Castle, and seeing Star Wars again.