Patrice's Second Draft Update!

Drumroll! After seven months of dealing with a pandemic, having a very busy summer at work, and revising five days a week nearly every week, I’ve got myself a second draft of my current work in progress! It’s YA road trip romance that in my creative genius, I’ve dubbed “Road Trip Story” until I can come up with something better, and it features Tiff, a risk-adverse teen who’s got one week before college and one cross-country road trip to get out of the friendzone she accidentally put herself in with her best friend, Rob.

Honestly, this was the best experience with a second draft that I’ve had so far. With my last story, I didn’t even make it all the way through the second draft before I had to start over because I was writing myself into a corner and had no idea what was going on with my plot. It wasn’t like things went perfectly this time, but it was about a million times better than that.

Here’s how the whole thing went:

· September 2019–January 2020: wrote first draft as fast as I could

· February 2020: read the draft and used Trello note cards to list all the problems I needed to fix

o And I’m not talking typos or changing wording, I’m talking things like, “Add Bethany backstory scene,” and “Decide who gets the clue wrong or what happens on the hunt in Vegas. Why does Rhiannon get left behind?”

o There were ~150 problem note cards to deal with

· February–August 2020: write second draft mostly from scratch although incorporating parts of first draft when possible, addressing *most* problems along the way and making notecards for problems to deal with in future drafts

o I clocked the time I worked on the revision—it took 160 hours total. Not too long if this were my full-time job . . .

· September 2020: give draft to writing critique group to get feedback!

So that’s where I’m at. Going to take a little break from Tiff and Rob for now and have a look at my Little Mermaid retelling, which is the project I want to work on next. I wrote a terrrrrrible draft of it for National Novel Writing Month in 2016, and it was so bad I never looked at it again. I haven’t hashed out the details yet, but I can tell you that my story will feature Ariel as assassin, reluctantly set on revenge . . . stay tuned!