What projects are you currently working on?
Some of you know too intimately well that I'm currently working on my second draft of a novel called Silk. For those of you not well acquainted with this: it's a steampunk genderbent bastardisation of Beauty and the Beast. Where the beast is a giant spider. And that's not even the weirdest part of the story - most of the characters are a wall, and there's a pregnant ghost who hears everybody's thoughts.
Despite this, and I do talk it down a lot, it isn't as disturbing as I make it sound (promise), I absolutely love this story and I'm loving writing my second draft.
What is everyone else working on? What stage are you at? Tearing your hair out yet?
Project Talk
28 posts in this topic.
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I'm working on two projects! The first of which is called Orphan and is a speculative/noir about a guy in the mob who makes a lot of poor life choices. It involves explosive smart watches, guys being bi's, dates to the museum and a lot of expensive suits. I've been querying this project for a year now! I'm waiting to hear back from one prospective agent, and I'm still shopping it out in the mean time.
The second project is a fantasy called Lovelies and is about a woman named Ophelia who was born with ram horns and gets married to a shady dude named Alexander Kilitch. It's Bluebeard's Castle meets Daughter of Smoke and Bone with a splash of Downton Abbey and a whole lot of astrology and flowers thrown in on top like some kind of weird confetti. I started the second draft two months ago and it's going along pretty well! -
I'm in a similar boat to Sachi! I'm querying my book/masters thesis, Fox Who Stole Her Name , and have been for about six months. It's about siblings, absentee fathers, the end of the world and the friends you meet along the way. That makes it sound fluffy. It's not.
I'm also working on a new project called Coyote which is about Deaf millennials, human trafficking, and the opioid crisis in Midwestern America. A regular romp in the hay. -
We need to start a query trench support club! I'm also querying a novel - Captive, been at it for six months. I'm still waiting to hear back from one interested agent and continuing to query in the meantime. It's about two people that are supposed to be together but one has an overbearing girlfriend and is afraid to commit, and the other got kidnapped while on a service trip to the Philippines.
I'm also working on Liz + Zac which many of you probably saw me posting about. I just finished the second draft and am taking a break for now. I'm hoping to start revisions at the end of this year or the very beginning of next year. It's a love story about runaways/homeless teenagers.
I've juuuust barely started, as in have 74 words written of a brand new story, no title yet. It's another love story (because I'm just a sucker for those!) but it's going to be lighter than my usual fare. It's going to be about high school marching band and catfishing. -
Carlito- for some reason I was sure that Captive was fantasy! But obviously not. Omg I hope you hear back soon. I'd love to read it!
(I already know about/have read Chiko and Lauren's novels but I will happily report that they are excellent and an agent is going to snap them up any day now) -
Supposedly I'm still working on Book Man revisions, but now that Camp Nano is over...no, I'm not. It started a simple but poorly plotted fantasy about this guy who lives in a house made of books, and then he finds out that there's all this magical stuff going on in the park across the street, and then this evil creature named Goblin is about to escape because the spell imprisoning him is failing.
But now the original MC is one of several MCs, including his best friend's wife and a policewoman. And therefore there are several different viewpoints, plus occasional scenes from minor characters' viewpoints, so at this point it just feels like a sprawling mess.
I love my babies too much to abandon them completely, but I should really take a break for a while.
Mostly what I'm doing is, of course, the Chosen Grandma story, which is basically exactly what it sounds like. An 83-year-old woman finds out she's the Chosen One and leaves the nursing home to face an evil sorcerer and his army of dragons, armed only with her stabtastic knitting needles. -
@BlueAfrica - I have not had much chance to read through your Chosen Grandma stuff, but I read your rewritten opening chapter, and the stuff you post for #teasertuesday , and I love it so much even just from those.
I don't have anything well-formed enough to be called a project at the moment, but I have some things I would like to be working on.
There's my 2016 NaNovel, Magic Words, which is crying out to be made into a second draft - the basic premise is "modern day London, only magic exists, only people think it's a bit sucky and won't get you any Real Jobs, much like many niche arts subjects in the real world", and the main drama revolves around "MC loves magic, loses the ability to use it". It's VERY first-drafty, though, and I'm not quite sure what the actual plot is
And there's a setting I've been toying with for a couple of years, which is pretty much based on "what if Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli were dating and also women" + "what if elves and dwarves but more like interwar Britain than medieval Britain". I'm not getting anywhere fast with it, though, and I'm wondering if it might be interesting to jump back a few centuries in the world history and see what I can find there. -
@Cadi - all of these sound so cool omg especially the last one! I want a 1930s Gimli drinking a gimlet and smoking a long cigarette!
How can I force you to write it???
Also @BlueAfrica - Chosen Grandma sounds so great and I love the concept every time I see it. If I could just sit down and read it - though I need to finish Liz and Zac before I start any new YWS novels! -
Omg @Cadi I would read the heck out of both of those, deeeeefinitely the LotR-in-postward-London one. WRITE THE THING.
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Turns out, telling me it sounds great is an excellent Step One for Getting Me To Write It! I feel a lovely warm glow of enthusiasm. Maybe I'll get my notebook out on the train today
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DO IT.
(I am really tops at Telling People Things Sound Great.) -
Also - Blue - your Book Man revisions sound like my Unruly revisions. What started as a single PoV story grew in my head, and now it's this bloated beast of a thing with four PoVs, subplots I can't keep track of and I just wore myself out.
I want to get back to it but I feel like I made it too big and sprawling, and yet at the same time I feel so reluctant to cut out anything or anyone. So I'm letting it rest and hoping that I'll have a eureka moment on how to fix it.
(open to suggestions on how to fix it)
(also, Unruly is ostensibly about an 18 year old duchess (Astrid Race) in a fantasy setting whose best friend, the crown princess (Alicia) goes missing mysteriously from their boarding school. There's magic and dragons, evil queens, white knights, hapless squires, catty but troubled ladies in waiting, roses, unrequited love, balls, all on the road to find the missing princess. I love them all. But it's too big. Help). -
YEP that's basically what it's like at this point (and what an appropriate title "Unruly" is!)
I dunno, maybe at some point we'll just have to let other people read our babies and tell us if they think they're too big and sprawling. Like on the one hand I know for sure that my plot is stronger than it was originally, but I'm so not used to write from a thousand different viewpoints, even though I've read books like that and enjoyed them, that I feel like it's too much. But maybe it's not, and that's just me.
Taking a break is definitely a good start! ~says me, a person who has yet to take a break from Book Man~~after this draft though, I SWEAR~ -
BlueAfrica wrote:I dunno, maybe at some point we'll just have to let other people read our babies and tell us if they think they're too big and sprawling.
I am totally up for beta-reading drafts and trying to put together some critique of the novel as a whole, if that is a thing anyone would fancy. All the projects mentioned so far in this thread sound super cool! (I don't normally get into novels on YWS because I'm not good at keeping up chapter-by-chapter and I do most of my reading offline in Tube tunnels; complete drafts on a Kindle are more my deal.)
(Incidentally, I just remembered there's totally a copy of one of the first drafts of Unruly (like, the date on it is 2012) hanging around in my email! From the email I sent back to you, Stella, it looks like I enjoyed it a lot ) -
I'm currently writing Clan - Set in a world ruled by Clan systems and flint lock pistols. Rox is shoved fully into leading her Clan when a vicious attack by a creature leaves her boyfriend and many other Clan members eviscerated. And she basically has to figure what's doing it and stop it before it either picks them all off or a Clan war leaves them all dead.
I'm on the home stretch with that, I just need to make myself finish it this year. I WILL FINISH IT.
And then my next one (which I hope to start next year) is Soul, which is about a university student in Edinburgh who sees ghosts, has a wee ghost hunting club as it were and one day meets a guy who is just 'wrong'. I'm actually really looking forward to it! Be weird to write in a real world setting but also fun and it's basically a love story, which I am excited about xD
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