I am actively writing…

Despite summer distractions!

I’m writing new scenes for a book I actually want to publish someday instead of just random things. I’m so happy to be productive again. While youngling was at morning nature camp, I got a little me time in and opened up Red Hour. I started from the beginning, making minor edits, and continued to fill in the gaps with connecting scenes.

The main struggle I’ve had with this standalone book—other than finishing the draft by writing all those new scenes—is finding a balance between being true to this particular story and true to my writing style (which I am still defining).

Sam’s voice is crystal clear in my mind and coming across the page, but she is surprisingly raw. The violent action and intimate scenes just poured out of me with more explicit language and more detail than in my previous books. Now I find myself pulling out a phrase here and there to scale things back just a touch—or sometimes, quite a bit!

I don’t need to write clean reads, or keep my romantic scenes closed-door, but I do have a line I don’t want to cross. I’m just struggling to define what exactly my line is. I have read plenty of adult fiction in a variety of genres and am comfortable with violence, foul language, and intimate content. But most readers and writers probably have a comfort level—or probably more accurately a discomfort level.

I am not sure how far I want to go with my language and content. I want to have freedom to explore different worlds, characters, and writing styles, but I also feel I need to consider that if I want to have a writing career, there needs to be some consistency and trust between me and readers. That makes this a little tricky, since Red Hour sounds/feels very different to me from my other books.

I consider my Bonds of Magic series to be pretty tame—the violence is not graphic and the intimate moments are brief with non-explicit language. Dreamcatcher sometimes feels borderline fantasy romance—it has longer intimate scenes—and the later books in series contain harsher violence. There is a handful of swearing but I mostly made up swears that are unique to that world. My subsequent drafts of the Dreamcatcher books successfully scaled back any word or phrase (*cough or paragraph *cough) that hit my discomfort level. It usually happens when I think of actually showing the book to a lot of people. But Red Hour has more of those moments of violence and intimacy to edit, and I think that is why I feel like making sweeping changes could affect the tone of the book I originally wrote.

There are things that Sam says, in her head or aloud, that I absolutely love. Lines that wouldn’t make sense in any other book. They are so specific to who she is and the strange magical world I have created that there is no denying her unique voice is still there even if I make a lot of edits. So for now, I’ll keep plugging away at these edits, keep writing new scenes, and see what the end result is when it’s done.

Wish me luck!