Okay so I swore I didn’t do outlines before because every time I’d tried in the past with this book it ended up only partially complete and I wouldn’t always stick to it. I did follow a sort of timeline before just so I made sure I was referring to time related references properly, but aside from that I pretty much winged it.

Now that I’ve been unsuccessful with the first draft and second re-write I figured, maybe it’s time I give outlines a shot, maybe it will help me stay on track better. So today I sat down and actually wrote an entire outline of the story from start to finish. I’m sure it’s not exactly the proper way to do an outline, but it serves its purpose and did force me to decide what scenes must stay and what could be canned. It also allowed me to divvy up the scenes between Teagan and Bryce properly so that I’m no longer attempting that breaking voices within chapters stuff I asked you guys about before.

But putting together this outline has left me feeling oddly concerned. There just doesn’t seem to be a way to reduce the story in it’s entirety down to less than 30 chapters which I know will feel exhausting to many. I had originally thought the story would have to be told over 2 books, but I’d really like to keep it all in one if possible. Still, I have no idea how I can manage to do that with 30 chapters. Now, I was thinking, I’ve seen books that break the story apart like part 1, part 2, etc… and I could easily do this as there are 3 parts to the story that could be decent breaking points, but it would still be a large novel regardless and I wonder what people think about that. I’m thinking the reception will not be good.

I want to tell myself to just stop worrying about it and just write it, but I just can’t. It’s making me feel crazy right now.

What to do, friends, what to do?

Peace – Sarah

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