The initial story of my sister sleuths, Mira and CeCe, is very close to moving on to the next stage! Or is it?
Over the past few weeks I've been ignoring the manuscript and instead focusing on other important parts of moving the book to the next stage. It turns out, writing is the easy part. Well, kind of. What I do know with more certainty now is that taking an idea and transforming it into a fleshed out story (let's say, a book) is no easy task. And then come revisions. There should absolutely be revisions, probably a lot of them!
I've done a couple of rounds of major revisions. Some have been guided by me re-reading and realizing things (oh, hey, character who I forgot about and wrote out of the second half of the book). Others I made after having some beta readers look at the book—they had some great ideas and then chatting with some of them also had my brain going in different directions about character development and plot. Those conversations were especially generative because I have a lot of ideas (some already outlined) for future books about the adventures of Mira and CeCe.
Revising to make a cohesive story for one book that also connects to a larger series is challenging though! Some days it feels like I am banging my head against the wall.
Thinking about character archetypes and how they might play out in a particular story type has been extremely useful at helping me to also identify some aspects of the novel that could use more attention or a little extra TLC. Just today, I was trying to identify all my essential characters and what roles they play. I have a spreadsheet and everything! So, in a mystery story like this one, I realize that having a herald that can alert my readers to dangers of my antagonist is important, and the character who is in this role maybe gets a little too sidelined in an important part. The very simple act of trying to plug in key characters and moments into a spreadsheet has helped me see where a few more tweaks could help my story.
And it's hard y'all. To make changes that could affect how people react or other scenes in the book. It can be time consuming to make changes. It means yet another close read to make sure that everything in the story reads correctly.
But it feels worth it, at least to me.
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