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Stephanie Leary

Writer, WordPress consultant, recent MLIS grad

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Novel in 90, round 2, week 1

June 8, 2007 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

The first week has gone pretty well, considering that this project is a huge reeking mess. As soon as I opened the file, I remembered why I’d abandoned it in the first place. The plot is tangled and full of holes, like a half-unraveled sweater. My protagonist’s motivation seems to have changed on a weekly basis, and the antagonist is nothing more than a wisp of a suggestion. The love interest is great, except I have no idea why he puts up with the heroine at all. I seem to have changed my mind on several key backstory points a couple of times, so I have a dozen scenes written with one assumption and another dozen written the other way. Of the 45K I started with, half were written in third person and half in first. I’ve already dumped 5K into the file labeled “cutting room floor.” And I haven’t finished typing in all the handwritten stuff, so there are still a few missing threads.

The temptation to shove the whole thing into a box and forget about it is great. I did 5,823 words anyway, and I’m about to do some more. If you should hear screaming later tonight, disregard it; it just means I’ve found yet another dead-end scene tucked away in the file.

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I’m a front end developer at Equinox OLI, working on open source library software. I was previously a freelance WordPress developer in higher education. You can get in touch here or on LinkedIn.

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