Story Update: Moving my Story Back to the Other Blog

tl;dr I'm going to stop posting my story on this blog, and will only post it on its own blog.

The Long Version

A couple years ago, I made the decision to move my story from its own blog (The Castle in the Magic Forest) over to my main blog here.

I've now decided that this was one of my less inspired decisions, and so I'm going to go back to only posting my story over at its own blog.  At least for now.

When I initially decided to start moving my story over to this blog in 2021, the idea was that I was done fooling around with writing aimlessly, and I was ready to start working seriously on a polished second draft.  

As I said at the time:

I've now decided to go ahead and start writing that second draft.  And because the whole point of this second draft is that it's supposed to be readable by other people, I'm going to start posting those chapters here on this blog. 

But "second draft" was always a misnomer on my part.  It wasn't the second draft.  It was actually the first draft of the backstory. 

In my original story, the characters of Catherine and Carlyle were 65 years old, and the main story was about their children and grandchildren.  But as I was writing that story, I gradually began to realize that there was a lot of backstory to the older characters, and that it might make the story less confusing if I just went back to the beginning and tried to tell it all chronologically.  So when I decided to go back and write about Catherine and Carlyle when they were 15, I was moving the timeline back 50 years from everything I had written previously, and was essentially creating a whole new story.  

[I know I'm on record as saying prequels are awful--see, for example, HERE and HERE--but I think going back to explore the backstory while you're still writing is different.  Since the narrative is still in the process of being formed, you can, in theory, still smooth out the continuity so that everything fits together.  And in fact there are a lot of great novels in which the author realized somewhere along the line that the backstory was more interesting than the story--War and Peace, for example, or To Kill a Mockingbird.  

I'm not comparing my story to those novels, I'm just trying to establish some precedents for a general principle: writing a prequel to an existing story is a bad idea, but developing the backstory of a work in progress can sometimes be a good idea.]

So anyway, I wasn't polishing up an existing story into a second draft, instead I was writing the first draft of a something new.  But despite this, there was supposed to have been a difference in the writing style.  In the original story, I was literally making it up as I went along.  When I sat down to write my 15 minutes each night, I had no idea what I was going to write, and I just formed the story as I typed.

With the new backstory, though, it was supposed to be different.  I was actually going to plan out the whole thing, and have character arcs and a story structure.  And in that sense, it was supposed to be more presentable than the original story.  

I was inspired by one of Steve Donoghue's videos on writing, in which he said that if you're going to spend the time writing something, you might as well make a story that can be presented to other people.  The original story, because I was making it up as I went along, had a number of plot threads that were set up but not followed through.  But this time, I was going to plot it all out carefully.

At least that was the idea.  But it didn't quite work out that way.  I wanted to plan everything out in minute detail before I started writing the backstory (i.e. chapter by chapter, scene by scene), but I couldn't do it.  I sat down at the computer screen, and I just couldn't visualize the story in that much detail before I started writing it.  I needed to actually write the thing before I had a feeling of how it was going to go.  So I made a rough outline of the intended plot, but rough is all I was able to do.

Also it became apparent as I wrote that I didn't have a clear idea of the pacing.  Things that I initially planned to do in three chapters ended up taking me nine chapters.

On December 18, 2021, I realized my mistake, and switched the name from "the second draft" to "the first draft".  (The original story I then re-christened the "zero draft").

As I wrote at the time:

I've decided to do a bit of renaming on my drafts.  I'd been calling the draft I've been posting on this blog a second draft, but I've decided that's not really an accurate description.  It's more of a first draft on the backstory.  All the story in it I'm working through for the first time.

Plus, my so-called "first draft" isn't really a serious draft.  It's more just playing around (what Steve Donoghue refers to in his video as being a Pantsers).  So I've decided to re-name the so-called first draft as the "zero draft".  And the so-called second draft is now the "first draft".

Then, in April of 2023, I went a step further and admitted that this draft wasn't ready for feedback yet, and I probably shouldn't even be posting it.  As I wrote at the time:

The prose and story is all still quite rough at the moment.  When posting the previous - chapters, I  - had - solicited - feedback from the readers of this blog.  But I've now decided that this was premature.  This story is still in its rough draft phase.  It's not ready for feedback yet.  Maybe I might get to the point where I'm ready to ask for feedback, but not yet.  

Arguably I shouldn't even be posting it yet.  (Most writers don't share their work when it's still so rough.)  But having started, I may as well keep going.  But now the purpose of sharing these rough draft chapters is just to let readers of this blog can see what I'm up to rather than to solicit feedback.

But after writing that bit, the quality of my writing has even further deteriorated.   

As I wrote in my notes for Chapter 8:

I wrote a lot of this while sleep deprived.  The basic outline of what I want to happen is there, but the prose is not.  Need to rewrite

And then more recently in my notes for Chapter 15: 

Yet another chapter that was mostly written when I was sleep deprived.  It needs some serious re-writing at some point to get it readable.

Now, to answer the obvious question: what am I doing writing when I'm sleep deprived instead of just going to bed?

And the answer is, I don't dare miss a day.  If I miss a day, I'll miss 6 months.  I know this from experience.  Oh, I’ll tell myself I’m only missing one day.  I’ll say to myself, “I’m tired tonight, and it’s been a long day.  I’ll just give myself one day off and then I’ll get right back into it tomorrow.”  But then the next day, I’ll say to myself, “Well, I already broke my writing streak by missing one day.  I'll just take another day off as well."  It happens every time--see HERE and HERE for past examples.  

So it doesn't matter how tired I am or how sleep deprived I am--if I haven't written my 10 minutes for the day, I don't let myself go to sleep until I sit down and write it.

But since I'm working 3 jobs and have two young kids, I'm always busy.  And because, like all writers, I procrastinate on my writing and leave it till the last possible minute, I'm always writing it right before bed, when I'm feeling sleepy.  Some days extremely sleepy.  And it's very hard to write anything that makes sense.

[As to the other obvious question--why am I doing this at all given that I obviously find it such hard work--well, I've wrestled with that question before on this blog--HERE, HERE and HERE, so I won't go through all that again now. ]

I still believe that crappy first drafts can have some value in a story's evolution.  (The prose may not be salvageable, but you can still get an idea of the pacing, the plot points, potential problems and plot holes, etc.)  So I'm going to keep pressing ahead.  But still, it's not the kind of thing you should be sharing with a lot of people.

If this is going to be just a crappy first draft that I write while mostly sleep deprived, and that is going to be mostly unreadable, then there's no need to post it here on the main blog.  I'll just keep working on it over at the other blog instead. 

I'm not hiding it completely.  If you want to follow my progress, you can still go to https://thecastleinthemagicforest.blogspot.com/.  But it just doesn't make sense to show this story prominently on my main blog if this is the state it's going to be in.

When I get to the third draft stage (if I ever get to the third draft stage) then I'll start posting the story over here on my main blog again.