Treading Water

Time to face the music with the NaNo book. Actually, The Five Step Plan has some good bits! It also has some issues, like drive-by secondary characters, characters on green screen (all talk and action, no background and setting), motifs that drop in and out, and the usual “good God, please tell me I didn’t write that tripe.” Then again, I was coughing up as much as possible in one month, so I can be forgiven some of the tripe.

The problem now is how to pull all those threads together and make them coherent. That, and decide whether first or third person is the best voice. Reading a couple of romantic comedies back to back hasn’t helped…hero’s POV, secondary characters’ POV, etc. etc. as opposed to one heroine, one viewpoint. I’m aiming for a lighthearted women’s fiction tone–think Hissy Fit or another of the Mary Kay Andrews oeuvre–but how does that play with my voice?

And I normally love to revise. This one’s tough, though. Then again, I’ve never had to wrestle with a full draft before. I normally figure out a basic synopsis, then work through it chapter by chapter, revising chapter by chapter after I’ve finished the full. But those chapters are real chapters, not scattershot 3K words here, 800 words there. Yikes.

Time to call in the troops on this one. I need a reader to assure me that 1) It doesn’t suck, and 2) I can do this. Any takers?