Story Sprawl and the Downfall of Umbra

Soon-to-Be OLD Cover and Title for Umbra

It’s not as dramatic as all that, but it’s causing me more than a little grief in the scheme of what I have been writing, which is the sequel to Umbra: A Post-Apocalyptic Mystery*. I finished the first draft of the so-far-title of Umbra 2 and while it was percolating in its pre-revision phase, I started on Umbra 3. As of today, I am one-third of the way into the first draft, and making good progress.

WAS making good progress. See, something happened when I started playing “Question and Answer” to get an idea of how to shape the ending. All but a tiny smattering of my targets to aim for are pretty good and currently I could use any one of them I chose. Until I started to write down my endings for… SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN’T READ UMBRA… the unit.

With a massive groan, I realized I skipped over a WHOLE lot of meat, and what I realized I was writing now was not Umbra 3, but Umbra 4, and there could be an entire novel, with minimum revisions, that built up a lot of my world and the important conflicts between the others, sitting in between UAPAM and Umbra 2.

So… I’ve pretty much decided to finish writing Umbra “3” (which will really be “4”) and go back while that one is fermenting into a palatable brew while I write the real Umbra 2.

Oi, my head.

But, you may be asking, “T.R., what does that have to do with the title of your blog?”

I generally have story sprawl (as opposed to story creep which can get you derailed), and I should have known this because I had that very thing happen while I was writing the first Umbra (first one in its present incarnation, not the one I wrote in 2011 that now only minimally looks like its descendant). My original draft took it from… SPOILER ALERT TERRITORY… Vera and Shaw meeting the kid, chasing him all across the Circuit, ending up in a bad place and everyone being redeemed, yada yada. But as I was writing that story, I realized they left Hinge far too quickly and there was something going on there that fed into the overall danger of the world, with plenty of hints dropped all throughout the narrative. It smacked me in the face before, and it’s smacking me now, as I moved the characters off from Point A to Point B without so much as a second sentence to describe the motion and now I’ve realized I went far too thin on that one. So I have to go back and turn that little trip into a whole new story. Sprawl.

It kept me from writing short stories and keeping them in the word count limit for, say, magazine submissions. I had these HUGE worlds, like an entire galaxy of planets swirling within me, and I want to explore so much of it that I turn what should be a short story into an epic. I also know I sprawl during revision, adding a lot of meat to the bone (not fat, not fluff. Meat) so that I know when I end a draft with a word count I can expect it to grow by at least 30%**.

As for the “downfall” bit? That’s the “plans” part. This one will be completed first, and then I will get to the next, which (it pains me to say) puts off my planned publishing schedule a little more. My plans were to have a secure date in place for a release and announcement for preorders. “Planned” being the key word which is laughed at by God and Men alike. And we all know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men…

Have you ever had this happen to you, when you hop headfirst into a task with unbridled enthusiasm only to be met with the realization that you’re missing a whole lot of groundwork that had to be in place? Did it kill your enthusiasm and make you abandon the whole thing, or did you finish the current task as far as it needed to go and then go back and address the foundational issue?

*Which will be undergoing some plastic surgery with a title change and a new cover, date of release to be announced when I get the others finished.

**I’ve since written short story first drafts with that count in mind to rein it in. My revised stories are currently being submitted, within the proscribed word counts. Wish me luck.