It’s Day 12 of this month’s Camp NaNoWriMo challenge. I am either hard at work or hardly working (who can tell?) on finishing the first draft of my Terrible Romance Sequel story. Here’s how it’s going…
So, as you may have guessed from the very clever (hopefully working) title, the Terrible Romance Sequel is supposed to be a romance (albeit a terrible one), but it’s coming together much differently than Love & Other Lies. Which is causing me absolutely no anxiety at all. (Translation: all the anxiety in all the world, but to be fair, that would be true regardless of how the story came together).
Anyway, complete lack of anxiety aside, a while ago, I was talking with a writer friend about my some of my concerns with the Terrible Romance Sequel and how I felt like it was lacking a subplot, but I was struggling to figure out one that would actually serve the main plot. In doing so, I supplied him with a quick synopsis of the story as it existed in that moment. Then he said, “Oh, so the romance is the subplot.”
To which I responded:
Which means that, in true terrible romance fashion, the Terrible Romance Sequel is living up to its name because the romance has somehow become the damn subplot. Which is probably…not great, maybe, but it leads to another, bigger, more pressing concern…
If the romance is the subplot, that means the main plot is this mystery/suspense thing.
Which is a problem because it turns out that I am just as bad at writing mystery/suspense things as I am at writing romance. You may not have thought that was possible, but it totally is.
I mean, I guess the saving grace is that my main character doesn’t know how to solve a mystery, either, so we’re stumbling through this thing together. We’re all, like, “Wait…is that a clue? It might be a clue. It could be a clue. What do we do with it if it is a clue?”
Maybe we need to watch some Murder She Wrote or Blue’s Clues or something.
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to stumble and fumble my way through this first draft, tripping over clues when they reveal themselves and finding (however accidentally) my way to the end. It’s a first draft—it doesn’t need to be pretty. It just needs to be done. The second draft is, as my good friend Neil Gaiman once said, when you make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.
Which I certainly hope turns out to be true. Because right now?
CAMP STATS
Word Count Goal: 20,000
Where the word count should be: 8,000
Where the word count actually is: 8,449
Number of words to go: 11,551
Storyboard status: (Reminder that pink Post-its are completed chapters. Teal is incomplete. The white space in between is where I have no idea what will happen, but I think something should happen there.)
That’s gonna do it for me for now. I need to get back to Camp. But tune in next week for another action-packed installment of Postcards From Camp.
How are things in your corner of the world? Have you written a mystery? Any tips for me and my main character?
Looks like you’re doing pretty good so far, in spite of the, shall we say, genre shift. Perhaps it should be titled Terrible Mystery Novel?
Maybe that’s the real series. A series of terrible takes on various genres. Book Three will be Terrible Horror Novel or something.
The good news is there is such a thing as a mystery/romance. Or a mystery with romance. Or a romance with mystery. There’s a market, is all I’m saying. And having a main character who is just as flummoxed with the mystery as you can totally be a feature, not a bug.
Hey, why don’t you go do some reading? Search out mystery-slash-romance and see what you find. It might help.
Yes, the MC being as clueless as me is leading to a lot of internal monologue about her situation in which we attempt to figure out what’s going on. Could be fun. Could be a disaster. We’ll find out when we get to the edits.
I’ve been searching for some mystery/romance-type novels to see how other authors handled it.
Maybe it’s more romantic suspense? Or, if it’s “lighter” it could be a cozy? Maybe the genre will reveal itself as you keep going . . . .
I enjoy reading mysteries but can’t for the life of me get all the stuff straight in my head to write one, although I never say never when it comes to that because who knows? 🙂
Hahahaha—it’s *definitely* not a cozy. Romantic suspense sounds like a possibility, though. (But what do I know?)
My hope is that once I better understand the mystery itself and the components that go into it, I’ll be better able to lay the groundwork for it in the second draft because I’ll know better where and when the clues should be revealed, or what the focus should actually be, maybe. But we’ll see…
Your storyboard is very organized. I love that it is color-coded as well.