Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Second Draft

Second Draft

Tonight I finished an outline of my novella “Habit of Despair.” I know I should have had an outline before I even started but it’s hard to do an outline if you don’t know what the story line is. It was really convoluted the way this got written and I hesitate to even discuss it because it was done in such an illogical way.

It all started two months ago with a House of Sensual Prose (HSP) final. I really liked the way it came out so I kept my characters talking and wrote down where they told me the story was heading. When the underlying story was finished, it was then that I realized the need for an outline for inputting the research…But it was more than this….My supporting characters turned into the main characters about halfway through and I had to go in and hype them up and down play my old main characters.

I wanted to do this paperless and succeeded by using an old and a new laptop…The old laptop held the outline and the new one the chapters of the story. I could have done this with a desktop and a laptop or even a split screen but it sure is cleaner not to have all those notebooks and index cards lying about. Going through each chapter I pulled out the scenes into the outline.

Concurrently I got a new Dummies book and Leslie Wainger pointed out a lot of things I simply hadn’t considered in doing the first cut which I can now work in to the second draft. There are so many huge changes yet to come I hesitate to even call this a second draft.