Letters to Kel: RECYCLE!

There's a lot to be said for never throwing away anything you've written, no matter how incomplete or lame or full of logic holes it is.

Why?

Well, as a tie-in to NaNoWriMo ... you can take something you started years ago, revise it, and use it as a launching point for a new book. I'm talking about changing the names, even the genre, straightening out the plot that just wouldn't cooperate two, five, ten years ago, but now suddenly you know what went wrong.

For NaNo this year, I took a book I started writing more than eight years ago, originally titled "Hero Blues," and changed the title to "Hoax, Inc.," the next Neighborlee, Ohio novel.

(Blatant self-promotion: My newest Neighborlee, Ohio novel, LONDON HOLIDAY, was just released this past weekend from Uncial Press. Check out my publisher, or go to Amazon or iBooks or Kobo for an excerpt or to buy. Guaranteed fun!)

The first thing I did was change the major situation: A semi-pseudo-superhero is sick and tired of being taken advantage of by the mental midgets in the backwater town she has to protect. They've gotten so lazy, they don't pay attention to their gas gauges or obey the traffic lights, and complain loudly, to the point of threatening to sue her, when she doesn't rescue them from their own stupidity. So, she resigns and leaves town. And the story -- originally -- detailed how the superhero council tried to force her to come back to work.

Well, BIG changes when I turned it into a Neighborlee story. I wrote maybe 20 pages of new beginning before I get to the original start, and I added lots to that. Right now, I'm at 78,000 words on day 19 of 30 (the goal is 50,000 words) and I've almost quadrupled the original file, which was a lot of outline and notes to myself.

But I wouldn't have made as much incredible progress so far this month if I hadn't had that chunk of story that essentially fizzled once my heroine stopped grumbling and left the town. Yeah, there was a lot of funny stuff, silly stuff, grumbling ... and a lot of whining. Superheroes shouldn't whine, y'know?

Anyway -- NEVER throw away anything, no matter how bad it is. One of these days, you'll figure out why that rotten little chapter or 20 pages or outline that won't cooperate didn't work, you'll know how to fix it, and you'll be sailing along into a story that's FUN to write.