How Season of Us Came to Be Written, Part 2

Dahlia from my garden.

What I didn’t mention in my previous post was how much I loved working on this project.

I go through cycles of insomnia and normally when I wake up in the middle of the night, I stare at the ceiling unhappily. During the project I would happily get up and start working. I was constantly coming up with ideas I wanted to work into the story.

At the end of May I finished a draft on The Project of Forever 2 and as a reward I decided to finish Season of Us. And to incentivize myself, I hired an editor and got myself on the calendar. Then I recruited my beta readers and gave them a hard date when I would give them a draft.

The 44K draft was a bit of a mess. For example, I knew Shelly was involved in some sort of business but I wasn’t sure what. And I knew she would have a sidekick but changed my mind between friend, sister, sister-in-law and mother-in-law. I took a long weekend to map it all out and make an outline so I knew what I needed to fill in. It took me two months to get it figured out and expand the manuscript to 75K.

This is amazing speed for me. I’m not a fast writer plus I have a fairly demanding day job. I’m also the person most responsible for keeping my household from falling apart. Three cheers for the outline.

Then it was ready for the beta readers.