Forbidden - Revision Plan

Forbidden is my YA steampunk novel. Working on a revision, this pass focuses on story, character and structure more than language.

Here is the work plan for this one. My estimate is that I will have this draft done, and the story clean enough for beta readers, by mid-October.

A writing tip: Using a graph to show yourself (and others) progress against a fixed goal is a great way to motivate yourself.

 
Some points of interest:
• I update this weekly, Sunday evenings.
• The green lines are targets, one slow, the other fast. I need to stay between these to meet my estimate.
• The straight line across the top is the wordcount goal for the novel. You can see I need to cut 20,000 words to reach this.
• The other lines along the top show current word count.
• Also note that I refer to this as the 1st draft (because it is the first draft anyone else will ever see), though I have completed a previous rough draft.

What I have been up to

Not blogging...

Went on social media hiatus, not blogging, twittering, or face booking. Nothing deliberate about it, just fell into an intensive writing period and did not make the time.

So here is what I have been working on:

Forbidden, a YA Steampunk novel set in Victorian London: Completed world building and wrote the rough draft. Draft came out to 106,000 words, with 102,000 in support files (outline, brainstorming, world building).

The draft came together nicely, but it will need substantial rework -- at the mid-point it shifted from an ‘academy for gifted boys’ setting, to a Dickensian workhouse setting, and the tone became darker and far more dystopian. With this rework, I expect to have a clean draft by the end of the year (ready for first readers, and possibly submissions).

Also writing a new draft of Zombie Proof Fence, a YA novel set 3 years after a zombie apocalypse. This draft is based on feedback from several very kind first readers, and is mostly fine-tuning and trimming.

Sadly between the novels and other commitments, I have not found time to work on short stories or to blog. However, I am through the intense drafting on Forbidden and into editing mode so you may be seeing more on the blog.