Going forward by going backward

Well, I’ve come to a decision: I need to start over on Sweet Heart Catalyst.

See, it took me forever to come up with what I have. First of all, my pesky main character had decided that he was a cop investigating a murder: a giant subject about which I Knew Nothing! (as Schultz would say) So I had to read up on that, which took (and is still taking) time.

Secondly, I tried a new thing when I was writing this story: being deliberately disorganized and un-chronological. I now have a large number of bits and snips that I wrote out of order, at different times, whenever the ideas occurred to me. I’m not saying this was a bad way to write it; it was a different approach that resulted in a lot of ideas coming to the forefront. The only problem is that with this scattershot method, I tended to lack a sense of how the story was going as a whole. I had also avoided writing a lot of the police work related scenes because, heheh, I wasn’t totally clear on what exactly they would do, and needed to learn about it first.

So now I’ve thrown all those bits and snips in a document, in rough chronological order, and I have about 20K of wordage. A lot of it is “dated”, in that, things have changed considerably, particularly with the older stuff. Rather than continue adding to the existing stew of bits, I’ve decided to start a fresh document and write it chronologically from the beginning (which is not to say that I might not fold the spacetime continuum into flashbacks later). I can still keep some of the later material, but there is a lot of earlier stuff that’s going bye-bye.

But that’s OK, because I have the bones of the story figured out, including the police scenes that were confuzzling me before. So there!

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Also, I finished the first draft of Sergio, which has been renamed Bright Light, and have sent it out to my crit group and already gotten some very useful feedback.