On the death of a draft

Sometimes a story works. Sometimes characters and plot and story mesh together and things work. Then there is the rest of the time. In two months. I've managed 40K on Ghoulish Trappings. I have fixed stuff for the series, discovered some things that didn't work at all and fleshed out the world a lot. So there's that.

But somewhere close to the 35K mark, I realized something: the story didn't need to be told. The first novel: very much so. The one coming next [which will probably use this same title]: yes. But this story hovered in a place between them that never quite fit. The characters worked. Even the story did, but the plot teetered along and a lot of things that needed to happen simply didn't feel right, entire connections making little sense. If I didn't do the the novel entirely in Wray's POV, it might work. But I don't think so. So for the time being it's going to become purely 'stuff that happens between novels'.

If, somewhere down the road, the series sells and works, I could revise it and throw it up for free online. A story needed something overarching to hold the disparate elements together and this story does not, at present, have that. It needs a serious degree of revision in tone and plot that would basically involve a 'rewrite from scratch'. Which I'm not up for doing right now.

Some of this is probably because March-April tend to be my normal dead months of writing in a year. I'm not sure. But I find myself wanting to write the novel that was to come next more and finding that this novel isn't adding much to the series. It feels like part 2 of the first novel rather than a story in and of itself. I think I will get back to it at some point, and fix things up. It is fixable, the plot is doable, but I need a mental break from the series.

What that break will be, who knows? I need to edit the first book of the series, and will likely begin that soonish. In the meantime, I'm thinking of giving Boy & Fox another hard look and reducing it back to the original concept. It might work. It might not. Won't know until I try.