Buckle Up for Writing

It's week two of YA Buccaneers Spring Writing Boot Camp, and I'm happy to announce I'm now a member of Team Mazama.

Originally, we named ourselves the Swashbucklers in honor of YA Buccaneers pirate theme, then shortened that to the YA Bucklers, because if you live on twitter calling yourselves #yabucklers is super entertaining.

Then all the other teams decided to name themselves after mountains. So we rebranded ourselves Team Mazama. Mt. Mazama exploded about 7k years ago and is now Crater Lake. Oregon mountain climbers call themselves Mazamas, and were climbing the mountains of our manuscripts, so we agreed it was a good name.

Now we are the Mazama Bucklers and we are ready to blow the top off our writing, so buckle up. Yeah, it's a lot of mixed metaphors, I know. This is what happens when seven writers are joined together to form an accountability team. We mix our metaphors.

For today's check-in, I'm going to mix my metaphors even more. See that island in the center of Crater Lake in our badge photo? That's the new mountain rebuilding itself. Yay for volcanism. This week, I did a lot of rebuilding too.

Last week, I was super proud of myself, because I was ahead of schedule on my revisions of The Evolution of Emily. I was so far ahead that I set today as my new deadline to finish all my edits. Um, yeah, that didn't happen. Instead, I got a crazy new idea that required me to drastically change one of the major characters. This change makes the story a lot better! I hope it's something my beta readers would have suggested, 'cause it needed to happen. I figured it out on my own though, before bothering to send EoE off to betas.

Of course, this means I needed to re-write the entire book, again. Okay, not the ENTIRE book, only the scenes that this redefined character appeared in. And a few scenes that she wasn't in before but needs to be in now, because this change primarily involved making her a much bigger character. Yeah, it was basically the entire book.

I did it though. Character revised, up to exactly where I was in the story a week ago. Or actually slightly less than that. The Evolution of Emily is now fully polished through chapter 27. I think I was at chapter 30 last week. The last few chapters are still really rough, and will need to change A TON based upon this major character change subplot twist I added last week. So even if I only have a half a dozen or so chapters left, it's a lot of work.

I really do want to send this book off to beta readers the first week of April though. That deadline remains firm. So my goal for next week is the same. Finish all revisions by the end of the week. I'll now have slightly less time to do a final read through before sending it off to betas. But I did just do another full read through this week, so it's all good.

How has your writing been going this week?