Years ago I wrote about 15 pages about a group of sisters and wanted it to have a SciFi magical realism angle. I wanted it to include time travel but that wasn't the point, it was the result. Ten years later I'd integrated the idea of a cult and Reconstruction and pitting SciFi against magical realism. You think its magic, I know its a form of science.
Now I had all the pieces, the question then became form. Do I hand write 50 legal pages of back story for 7 sisters, and their mother and the cult? That's 450 before editing.
I finally decided I liked the sparseness of text on the page, I didn't want to overwrite. 200 plus pages became my limit so I had to distinguish the sisters more starkly and most importantly make it driven by the plot, the back pieces and the sisters in the foreground but not as important.
I wanted to give up because my SciFi magic point was weak. Aliens? Maybe.
Finally in the dusting around the edges I got my answer but it took years of a snip here, a few pages there and then finally sitting down and sewing it together.
S the novel was completed and is nothing like that one I conceived a decade ago. That's the hardest part that when I got the first galley proof did it make sense. The assembly sounds hard but really committed writers are like Casanovas, affairs stories full books, on a shelf. Waiting.
It is a better, more mature book though. It's tight in page count and content, each project I attack to garner it's own style. This one was sparse, ethereal, time jumping and a little horrifying. It became about the bond between mother and daughter, healthy and not.
My choosing routine involves reading snippets of stuff and listening for a few weeks, see if the characters have something to say. The pressure is then slotting it into my 3-8 hour writing schedule a day. I try to do about 10-15 hours of writing, not editing, not business stuff a week. This garners about 150 pages a week that eventually gets edited to maybe 75-100. But this is spread over a dozen projects with a handful becoming priorities to publish in a few months.
Mainly its like making a stew or aging wine. It's varying time per work.
