Writer's Fallout Shelter

Early things that change everything after, and things you slip in near the end that you then have to thread through and foreshadow ... yep, lots of reshuffling, reworking, etc. I wrote Forger of Dreams in 6 months then focused on revising it for over 1.5 years. Personally, I don't let myself move onto book II or anything else until I've got it clean enough to feel comfortable submitting it simply because I know that if I did, I'd never come back and revise! Who wants to revise when you can draft-write and move forward? I guess it's like the movie Groundhog Day. Revising takes you back and back and back to relive the same time-frame until you're sick of it. Sometimes you tweak it and it turns out better, sometimes it just ends up that your additions are lots of hot air and fluff, or even heading toward terrible. In that year and a half, I added over 20k words to my novel (which was already at 105k). Some characters that were originally just created as background or functional roles have become integral to the plot - just annoying and excess characters just simply refuse to die or drop out of the limelight.

Original intention has very little to do with the finished product I think - at least as fiction books go. In ninth grade when I was assigned to write a "Scary, Halloween Short Story" and I decided that I would really show off, I didn't have a clue that not only do I have no interest in writing Horror/Scary thus that only lasted for the first chapter or so, but that it would evolve into an epic fantasy series spanning in both directions of time. I had no idea what I had stepped into the middle of until I was addicted and committed. I certainly don't need to look for more stuff to fill up the planned books, I usually cut stuff out to downsize and they still naturally fill up almost double the book rate I expected.

I say run with it, commit yourself, aim for the potential of the story and not just our initial, short-sighted plans, and then hold on for dear life.

-Renegade