The Sequel Writing Journey: Sequel Writing Joys

Last week I talked about some of my sequel writing woes, but sequel writing isn't always difficult. This week I want to talk to you about some of the joys I've experienced with writing Iridescent's sequel.

I think my favorite thing about starting Coalescent was how easy it was to start. I already had a little bit of chapter one written before Iridescent was published, so I could include it as a sneak peek at the end of the novel. The differences between writing the first chapters of these books is amazing to me. With Iridescent, I had to introduce everything. Who is Aly? What is she doing here? Why is she here? What's going to happen? With Coalescent, I didn't have to do that. Sure, I did have to reintroduce her, but it felt easier this time around.

I didn't know who any of the characters were when I first started Iridescent, which could be a little frustrating. I would keep getting stuck on chapters, because I didn't know how to move forward with a particular character (most often Leo). Now, I know these characters. I know who they are and where they're going. I'm still learning new things about them, but it's knowledge that's adding onto their characters, not changing them to something completely new.

At least in most cases.

There are a handful of characters that are changing to me. It's like they've went, “Hey, I get what you thought about me, but you're missing a few things about me. Let me see if I can give you a new outlook on who I am.”.

And it's great!

Characters I didn't originally have a lot of ideas for, I now have new directions I can take them in.

I love getting to explore my characters and getting to discover new things about them. In the first book, I created these characters and started them on their journeys. In the sequel, I'm getting to see how they're going to grow and change along the way.

It certainly adds a fun experience to sequel writing!

Iridescent Cover Reveal and Release Date

Hello, everyone!

Today, I'm excited to finally reveal the cover and release date for Iridescent. Yes, the novel is finally finished and it will be coming out very soon. I've been looking forward to this day for a while now, because I've really been wanting to show off this cover.

So, without further ado, here it is:

Synopsis:

Things are more than they appear...

Aly Roberts wasn't expecting much out of small town Airyville, NC. 

She certainly wasn't expecting to get caught up in a conspiracy involving the town's gated community, Lagniappe. 

The people of Lagniappe are private, and Aly's new friend, Riley Monroe, is certain that they're hiding something. 

Lagniappe's secrets are dangerous, and uncovering them may just change their lives forever. 


So when will this book be coming out?

July 11

Iridescent will be available for purchase on Amazon.com and CreateSpace on July 11.

Throughout the next weeks leading up to the release day, I'll occasionally be posting quotes and snippets from Iridescent on Twitter and Instagram. You can find me here:

https://twitter.com/kaitlyns95
https://www.instagram.com/daydreaming_butterfly/


I'm really looking forward to sharing this story with all of you, and I hope that you'll enjoy it!

The Fear of Bad Reviews

The closer I get to finishing Iridescent, the more nervous I get about publishing it. What if I’m not able to sell any copies of it? Or even worse, what if everyone hates it and I get flooded with bad reviews?

Bad reviews are a funny fear to have, because it’s likely that a writer will get one at some point in their career. And it shouldn’t be a surprise. We know that not everyone will love our works, even if we do wish that they could. So why is there a fear of them? Well, when you put so much time and effort into something, you want it to succeed. In a way, our characters and our stories are like our children. We created them, developed them, and watched them grow and change. The last thing we want is to see them torn to shreds.

The thing is, bad reviews really shouldn’t matter. One bad review isn’t the end of the world, and it’s extremely rare that a book is universally hated to the point where it only has negative reviews. There’s always someone who will enjoy your story.

I mean look at Twilight. Seriously, raise your hand if you’ve ever heard, thought, or said that Twilight isn’t a good novel.

Well, you’re not alone. On Amazon, Twilight has 1,774 critical reviews. The majority of said critical reviews are also one stars. That’s a lot of negativity, and frankly those critical reviews are probably more review than many of us will ever receive on one novel. And yet, overall, Twilight has a 4.6 out of 5 star rating on Amazon. Why? Because 5,984 people gave the novel a positive review and the majority of those were five stars.

Now Twilight is probably an extreme case, but it’s the book I’ve seen torn apart more than any other. The way some people act, you’d think that there wasn’t a soul on Earth who liked the series. And yet, as we all know, that simply isn’t true.

Writing a novel is hard. We put so much time and effort into them, and we want to see our stories succeed. And yet, it is so easy to get caught up in the what ifs. The thing is, we can’t just let the negatives overtake us, otherwise we’re going to take the fun out of something we love doing. We need to think positively too.

So yes, maybe someone will hate my story and yours, but there’s going to be someone who loves it too. 

The Tenseness of Tenses

AKA, changing the tense of my novel made a big difference.

It probably should seem obvious that tense can make a big impact on a story, but I didn’t realize it until after I finished Iridescent’s first draft. I always knew that I wanted the story to be told through first person point of view, primarily because Aly wanted to be the one to tell her story. The tense hadn’t seemed as important at the time. I had been reading some first person, present tense stories and I had really enjoyed them, so I thought that I would give it a try. Interestingly enough, I hadn’t realized that a lot of people seem to dislike present tense until after I finished draft one.

Please note, I am not saying that you should avoid a tense just because some people don’t like it. I mean I know some people aren’t a fan of first person POV either, but that’s what works for my story. You should always go with the POV and tense that works best for a story. In the case of Iridescent, present tense wasn’t the best idea.

I had thought that present tense would make the story more suspenseful. The reader would be seeing and learning everything right as Aly did. However, when reading the first draft I noticed that the story really wasn’t flowing well. There was something off about it. So I decided that for the second draft, I would change the story to past tense and see how things worked then.

Turns out it made a pretty big difference.

I’m halfway through my second draft and the story is flowing so much better now. It also feels more natural to write. I discovered that there were some elements in the story that were a lot easier to convey once I switched to past tense.

I’m hoping that once this draft is finished, I’ll find that the flow of the story is overall a lot better than it was when I wrote the story in present tense.

So if you ever find yourself having trouble with your story’s flow, try telling it a different way. A change in tense may just be the fix you’re looking for. 

Optimistic Update

Hello everyone, long time no speak!

Well it hasn’t been super long, but still. I haven’t been as active with this blog as I had wanted to be when I first started it, but I’m going to try to change that this year. So more book reviews, and hopefully other posts, should be coming your way soon. I’ve had trouble in the past of coming up with posts to write, but I have a few ideas right now and I’m going to see if I can make them work.

By the way this blog is going to be one-year-old on Sunday, which is pretty cool.

In other news, I have finally finished the first draft of Iridescent! Which means I’m one step closer to being able to publish it! It’s taken me a lot longer to get this draft done than I had wanted. I’m hoping though, that now that I have it written down and I know how I want the story to go, it should be a lot easier to write from here on out. _{I’ve probably jinxed myself by saying that.} So within the next few days, I’ll start reading my first draft and jotting down some notes, and then it’ll be off to draft number two. I’m both looking forward and dreading this, mainly because I know there are going to be some issues in it that need to be worked out. But maybe it won’t be as bad as I’m thinking.

I have also made the decision that I will self-publish Iridescent once I get it to the point where it’s ready to be shared with the world. Before I was considering on going the traditional route, but there are really no guarantees that I would be able to get published that way. Plus, I want to be able to have complete creative control over what happens in this story and the others that follow it.

Well I think that about wraps up everything that’s been going on lately.

5 Things I Learned from NanoWriMo

50,000 words. That’s how much I’ve written this month. Okay, actually it’s a little over 50,000, but still. As you’ve probably guessed, I’ve been participating in NanoWriMo and it’s been an enjoyable ride. It’s also been a headache, frustrating, and a tad bit stressful trying to keep up with the word count goal. But hey, that’s writing for you. Actually, NanoWriMo has been pretty enlightening for me. I’ve realized some things about myself as a writer and about writing in general, and I thought I’d share it with all of you. So here are five things that I’ve learned from NanoWriMo:

1.) I Can Write More Than I Think I Can

This was probably my biggest takeaway from this month. In order to get 50,000 words written in a month, you have to strive to get at least 2,000 words a day. Which doesn’t seem like a lot, but some days 2,000 words can feel like 20,000. When it comes to writing, there are days when it feels like there are no limits, while others feel like you’re walking through quicksand. Writing 50,00 words in one month seemed like a reach to me, because it’s taken me longer to write that before. But this month I got in a rhythm that helped me keep up with the goal, and I could reach the point where I could write 10,000 words in a week. There were still days where I wasn’t very productive, but I used my writing pattern to force myself to catch back up. I’ve realized from this if I can keep up with this schedule I’ve created, I’ll be able to finish my first drafts a whole lot faster than I would if I was writing at my previous pace.

2.) I Am Terrible at Following an Outline

I’m honestly not much of a planner, even though I try to be. For my Nano novel, I Choose You, I wrote out a general outline of what I wanted to happen in each part of the book. I figured that it would help me keep on track with everything and help me know what I should do in the story. And it worked. For the first little bit. As soon as I hit what I wanted to be Act 2 of my story, the outline pretty much disappeared. New events popped up, events that originally were going to be there never showed up. Oh and a character that was supposed to be a bad guy, pretty much just turned into a jerk who really isn’t so bad. Yeah, me and outlines aren’t the best of friends. That being said…

3.) Having a General Idea of Where a Story is Going is Extremely Helpful

This might seem like a bit of a contradiction from my last point, but it’s actually not. Part of the problem I had with I Choose You was that I really didn’t have a good vision of where I wanted the story to go. I knew how I wanted it to start, and I somewhat had an idea of how I wanted it to end. The middle was pretty vague. I had an idea or two of things that could happen in it, but nothing that really connected point A to point B. This kind of made it hard to write. Without having a general idea of how I wanted to connect my beginning and ending, this story was more difficult to tell than it needed to be.

4.) Taking a Step Back from a Story Can Be Good

While I was writing I Choose You, I took a break from writing Iridescent. Which was honestly a really good thing, because while I was working on something else, I got new ideas for it and realized some of my current ideas just weren’t going to work. I was getting into a little bit of a rut with Iridescent and now I can see what the problem was and how I can fix it going forward. And hopefully these new ideas will help me make it an even better story than it would have been before.

5.) It’s Not About the Results, It’s About the Journey

Okay, I’m going to be honest and admit that this sounds like a cliché, but honestly it’s the truth. For a first draft at least. This month, I didn’t focus on what the end result for I Choose You would be. I knew that the story probably wasn’t the best and that a lot of it would need to be changed if I ever wanted to do something with it. But I didn’t go back and try to tweak stuff – something I’ve been known to do in the past. Instead I just wrote whatever came to mind. I played around with my characters and wrote a story. When I go back and reread it, I’ll probably cringe at parts and wonder what I was thinking when I was writing that. But it doesn’t matter. I can spend time editing and rewriting it later on. Right now, the important part is that I finished it. That’s what counts.

So how about all of you? Did you participate in NanoWriMo? If you did, did you learn anything new while you were writing your story? 

If At First You Don't Succeed...

The other week I tried to make an iced coffee. Easy, right? Someone had told me that she had started making her own iced coffees and they sounded delicious so I had to give it a try. She said all she would do is pour some vanilla over her ice cubes, then pour her coffee on top of that, and to top it all off she would add in some chocolate syrup. Naturally, I thought with a recipe that simple there was no way I could mess it up.

Boy was I wrong.

Too much vanilla came out of the bottle, then my coffee hadn’t cooled down enough so it ended up melting my ice cubes. And no amount of chocolate syrup can rescue watered down coffee. Yuck!

It was a disaster, and if I’m being honest, I felt really bad about the fact that I couldn’t make an iced coffee. But it was something I could learn from. I know what went wrong and I know how I could improve it next time.

And really, the same thing could be said of writing. Let’s face it, we writers rarely get everything exactly right on our first try. If we did, all of our first drafts would be ready for publication the moment we finish them. Instead we find sentences, paragraphs, and even chapters that just don’t work the way we thought they would. So like many things in life, we go back and try to figure out what went wrong. And once we figure it out, we go back and tweak and rewrite until we get it the way we wanted it to be.

So if that chapter just isn’t going the way you wanted it to, don’t let it get you down. Instead, look at what’s going wrong and look at ways you can improve on it. Then give it another go!

After all, if at first you don’t succeed…

Try, try again.

Vacationing With Your Characters

Recently I went on a beach trip with my best friends. I had a lot of fun, and it was a great time to relax and catch up on my reading (which means that I have some more book reviews coming your way soon). I hadn’t planned on necessarily bringing my characters along with me, after all a vacation is supposed to be for R&R. However, this vacation provided me with a unique opportunity to gain some new knowledge on the main character in my WIP novel, Iridescent.

Iridescent takes place in a small rural town. It’s a setting that is very familiar to me, as it’s where I’ve lived my entire life. I’ve experienced poor Wi-Fi, crappy cell service, and having very limited options of entertainment when hanging out with friends, but I’ve also experienced the beauty of the mountains and nature around me (deer are a regular occurrence, and during the past few weeks adorable fawns have made an appearance). So I know how the majority of my characters live and things that they can do in their free time. There is one notable exception to this, my main character Aly.

Aly did not grow up in a rural town, she’s moved to it. For her entire life, she’s lived close to the ocean at a popular tourist destination. This move would be a huge change for her, and there’s bound to be plenty of things that she would miss. While I was on vacation, I was able to see some of the differences between a location similar to where Aly grew up and one where the rest of my characters live.

For example, Aly would have access to more things to do with her friends after school and on the weekends than the characters who grew up in the rural setting.

These differences help me understand what Aly would be missing in her new town, but also see what she would be gaining at the same time.

There were several things that I saw on my trip that I would find myself wishing that I had back at home, and that thought would be immediately followed by Aly. This was something that I don’t have, but she probably did before she moved.

I had never thought about using vacation time as research time before now. But vacations are such a great opportunity to see things that I don’t get to experience on a daily basis. Not to mention it gave me time to plan out future chapters for this story and its sequel.

I usually follow a certain routine when I write. I have my writing spot, my beverage of choice for the day (tea or coffee), and then I’ll get to work on hitting my word count goal. However, floating around in a lazy river with my eyes closed produced better results when it came to plotting and getting in sync with my characters (after all this is their story, I’m just writing it down). So I’ve decided that I should shake up my writing schedule and try working in new places. You never know what will work until you try it after all.

So if you’re ever having trouble getting the right perspective on a character, try taking a little road trip. It doesn’t have to be far, even going a few towns over or to a nearby city can give you a chance to scope out a new setting and meet some new characters. You also might find that idea that you didn’t know you were looking for just by relaxing and having a good time. 

Love Triangle Woes

                Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, and it can be a sad time if you’re single. Luckily we can live vicariously through our favorite characters in our books and movies. And everything is great. They’re happy and madly in love, it’s only a matter of time until they get their happily ever after.

                But wait, who’s this guy? Why is she spending so much time with him and questioning her relationship? No, wait, you belong with the other guy not him! AGH!

                Love triangles can suck. Our happy couple is no longer quite so happy. He’s trying to prove his love, while she’s trying to figure out who it is that she wants to be with. Outside of the story, the fandom is splitting at its seams. Teams have formed, ship wars are being waged, and suddenly things aren’t quite as happy as they were before.

                As a writer, is this something that I want for my storyline? Do I want to venture into the realm of love triangles? I know who I want my main character to end up with. I also know that there is a chance that one of the platonic relationships could be misread as something else. What if readers think that these two would be better together than the intended endgame I have?

                I know that some might would recommend a love triangle to add in some drama and angst, but honestly, as a reader, I’m really getting tired of them.

                Sometimes they’re not too bad. I didn’t mind the love triangle in the first three novels of Keira Cass’s Selection series. All of the characters had their good moments, and it wasn’t dragged out too terribly long. It also might have helped that she ended up with the guy I wanted.

                Other times I get really frustrated.

                Take the Stephanie Plum series for example. I love the books, they’re humorous and a good light read, and I would definitely recommend checking them out. The only complaint I have is how long the love triangle has lasted. The series is going on 23 books now, and Stephanie still keeps going back and forth between Joe and Ranger. Honestly at this point I don’t think Janet Evanovich can really end the love triangle without alienating a large portion of her fanbase.

                After all these years, the fandom has grown and you have a large group of Cupcakes (Joe/Stephanie supporters) and a large group of Babes (Ranger/Stephanie supporters). And then you also have some who don’t care either way. Personally I am a Babe, and I have it worked out in my mind what it could be like if Stephanie and Ranger wind up together and the adventures they could have. This is a book series I have invested a lot of time in, and honestly, the series will probably be over for me if she goes with Joe.

                I’ll admit that I get very attached to characters. I know that it might sound unreasonable to quit something just because things didn’t turn out the way I wanted, but at the same time I don’t want to spend money or time on something that doesn’t appeal to me anymore. It’s happened to me before.

 

                I loved Once Upon a Time during its first two seasons, and during season two I became a Swanfire shipper. I loved Neal and Emma’s story and I really wanted to see them work things out. Neal actually became one of my favorite characters. Then the love triangle happened. Captain Swan vs Swanfire, and I’ll be honest and say that I might would have been fine with Captain Swan if Neal had still gotten a happy ending. Instead he was killed and my interest in the show died with him.

Gif  from ask-neal-baelfire.tumblr.com

                In a way, it doesn’t feel like a satisfying conclusion to a love triangle because one side just wins by default due to a tragedy. Or maybe it was satisfying to some and I’m just bitter.

                So what should be done when it comes to love triangles? I’m not saying that they’re completely bad, because they can be done well in the right hands.

In the end I think that the writer needs to hold firm. We may write for our readers, but we also write for ourselves. If a love triangle is planned, then it shall happen. If one is not destined to appear, then don’t force it to happen. There’s a good chance that things may get out of control if you step off course. Just try to stick with your guns, and keep with the story you’ve planned all along.  Even if you do end up making fangirls everywhere cry. I’ll admit I’ve shed some tears myself over a fictional breakup. I hope someday I can write such lovable characters, that they’ll affect people that way.