Friday Update 2/2/24
In an unusual move, this week I decided the big plan I had for Fated to the Wolf needed to be cut down to something more compact. It’s a story meant to go in an anthology with a collection of other shifter authors and the target length is 20k. While they would accept a 70k novel, that isn’t the goal of the project. At the same time, much of my fiction study in the last month or so has focused on the Villain Gets The Girl trope, as well as the general beats for dark romance, and I realized the main characters in Fated could be pushed into some stronger positions.
So on Monday, I re-plotted Fated to really punch up the Villain trope, the cinnamon roll trope, and the kill for you/touch him and die tropes. I also cut the plot down from 70k to less than half, now at 30k. The intent here is to leave some of the world building for future books in the series while also hitting the novella length instead of the novel.
On Tuesday I started re-drafting Fated from scratch to accommodate the character changes which leaves me in the very rare situation of having over 20k words of novel that probably won’t see the book in its final form. Little pieces of description will be pulled, like outfits or locations, but even those need tweaking for the new character voices.
Fated to the Wolf will be serialized here on the blog for members to read early and I think I will include some of the deleted scenes or chapters so people can see how dramatic the shift has been.
My main human character, Amari, is now a much stronger voice and character, and my shifter MC with a heart of gold has a clearer role in wooing him. Both of those changes made the new outline for the story pour out of me in one massive writing session, which is always a good sign.
Look forward to Fated to the Wolf later this year!