Hi folks, and welcome to the 10th writing club update. That’s right, it’s the big “One-Oh” - we’re in the double digits now.
I hope you are all safe and as well as can be, and able to find some time for creativity/writing. The weather here has been a hodgepodge of warm to surprisingly brisk; although seems to be angling towards warmer now. It will be nice to see the pollinators waking up and doing their rounds soon. Life doing its thing and all that.
Onward to our writers! By my count we’ve got:
Here is a link to last month’s post if you’d like to refresh your memory, or just take a little trip down memory late.
It’s cool to see so many people back! Seeing you all productive is amazing.
I’ve briefly jumped between series since my post last month, and I reworked about short of two books worth of an older dormant series with really extensive changes back to front. But I’ve since set it aside again. It was a nice breather from my main fantasy series, but both series lack an ending and currently the fantasy series simply has more concrete actionable ideas on how I’ll wrap it up.
Currently I’m doing some more revision work however. The fantasy series with the disabled protagonist has quite some dark parts, and some of them are a little overbearing at times. Less so deaths and destruction, but longer ongoing illness and fights. I’m trying to make sure there’s always enough of the main plot mystery arc and more lighthearted topics going on to make it easier to swallow.
But I’ve also had some tech work on the side, so I’ve been a bit distracted by that. In any case, I’m still hoping to wrap up the fantasy series before 2025 ends, but we’ll see.
Endings can be so tricky to get right. Any ideas on why this one has been eluding you? I know for me it can take a while before the story fully clicks and I know what I want the arc to be.
It’s mostly because I’m a pretty extreme discovery writer. (Not that I recommend it, but it’s how I best keep myself going.) Hence I kind of tried to write a more definite ending and failed, twice, which is why there is now a third book. This time I’m forcing myself to do at least the minimum of essential planning about the overall theme and message to actually wrap it up in a manner that will hopefully be satisfying and meaningful.
Volunteering for some brainstorming if you need to get the ending right! I’ve done it many times for people in our (Italian) writing group 😁
That makes alot of sense. I also kind of discover endings as I go. Best of luck discovering the right ending, i know how hard it can be :)
I have found I just have too many arcs to wrap up and too many thematic things to add in to purely “discover” it to make a satisfying ending to a series. At least so far I haven’t managed to.
Makes sense, I’ve found with bigger and more complex stories writing out a condensed outline of what I’ve already written can help click things into place. It helps me see the structure more since I tend to get lost in the details. Again best of luck, endings are so important and so challenging!
I love how you keep so many platters spinning. It seems like a great way to keep up forward progression, even when one project slows down a bit.
It’s great that your story has a disabled protagonist, and sounds like you’re not trying to sugarcoat it. Would this fantasy series be the dystopian one you mentioned? That is also cozy?? (I think I can picture it, but all these descriptions sound wildly unique when put together.)
Do you find the endings usually come together later for you? I find that really curious, because endings are usually one of the parts that come to me earliest. Very often before the middle and beginning even.
That’s the one. The protagonist is in a wheelchair from some later point on, so there’s definitely not meant to be any sugarcoating.
My usual approach is to think about the ending once the draft is about 80% done, in terms of page count. That works well for me if it’s not the definite ending for the entire series.