My first novel--a deer hunting horror story--was, by all conversative accounts, a 200,000 word novel. I wrote it back in college, Bemidji State University, and I completed the first draft roughly nineteen years ago this month.
There were a lot of things wrong with this novel. Most of which I didn't realize until several years later. I still learned many lessons with that first novel, ones I still carry with me to this day.
As I sat in the deer stand this past Saturday--for Minnesotans, this time of year is practically a statewide pasttime for many of the forests and fields are littered with spots of blaze orange--I thought about this story.
Then I came up with a plan to rewrite it. Completely. From scratch.
The basic story is still good, but it was way too long. I also had so many plotlines running through it, I failed to utilize the K.I.S.S. principle: Keep It Simple Stupid. Now, this story may not even be written (over from scratch) in 2014 for I have tons of other projects in the works. By all accounts, I'm probably looking at a 2015 date to work on this.
Sitting in the deer stand with my son, I also came up with a few other story ideas: a new mystery/suspense series, based on a character I wrote about in a short story in my novelette Guest of Honor, and another story that I'm calling Wild Hogs meets Duck Dynasty. Right now that's all I'm going to say about that--about either one.
I've started editing Shadowkill. I'm only on the fourth chapter at this point, out of an overall 50+, but things are going well so far.
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