Rejoice with Me, for I Have Finished a Draft!

Hello again my dear dear humans! I come to ye today with the announcement that I hath, indeed, finished the latest draft of the Comic Space Opera, tentatively titled The Kidnapping of Prince Ferdinand. 

A doodle I did trying to capture the aesthetic for the good guys’ planet. The song lyrics are just lyrics I found fitting and don’t actually belong to me; all credits to the original owners.

It's a good feeling, you know, finishing a novel. It seems to me that a celebratory post of some sort is appropriate. 

What that celebratory post is gonna look like? I dunno, man. It's a Monday night and I'm short on time and energy.

But I can at least give you the vital stats. I dashed off the closing scene of The Kidnapping of Prince Ferdinand late Friday night, January 20, 2023. The final word count is something like 81,000...not bad considering I was condensing three novel-length books into one. 

As for how long it took me to write this draft? ...it's hard to say because most of the book was written already; I had to rewrite a lot of the beginning, but the last half of the story is mostly copied-and-pasted from earlier drafts. I guess we'll put the official start date for this phase of the project somewhere in, like, August of '22. 

Five months? Six months? Not too bad. 

But then, in the grand scheme of things, I've been working on this novel off and on for the last eight years. So it's HIGH TIME we got SOMEWHERE with it. 

...Have I ever walked you through the ancient history of this story idea in a more or less logical fashion? No? I know I've alluded to it a lot but I don't know if I've ever...like...listed the drafts with dates and basic summaries. 

Let's make that a part of the celebration post.

THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THIS STORY IDEA

Draft #1: Amid a Million Stars
late 2014

I know it was late 2014 because I was in my sophomore year of high school. I know it was my sophomore year of high school because that was the year we studied ancient history & literature, i.e. the Epic of Gilgamesh, and I remember being SO FASCINATED with how ancient civilizations were once SO well-developed and SOPHISTICATED and COMPLEX and REAL, and yet we know them now mostly as broken bits of buildings and broken bits of stories. And I remember driving through downtown Cincinnati and looking up at the overpasses and thinking, "Someday this will all be ruins." And I wanted to write a story about an earth where today's civilization was remembered in the same way as Greek myths and Shakespeare and stuff. 

Which sounds a little bit thoughtful of 16-year-old me, but I hasten to add that my favorite TV show at the time was Lost in Space which is what made a space opera sound REALLY fun. 

I haven't looked at this draft in actual years, guys, because I'm pretty sure it was downright dreadful. I wrote it in a hurry, intending for it to be Book 1 of a Very Epic Trilogy. My main character was the most vanilla wish-fulfillment self-insert it has ever been my shame to make protagonist. The actual hero of the story was a prince who DIED in the end for no very good reason. I don't know what the plot was doing; it involved some random kidnappings and a war and a lot of preachiness and a besieged planet and a traitor, who betrayed the good guys in the end apparently for the heck of the thing. 

(It was supposed to be allegorical.) 

It was AWFUL, guys. 

But it had its good points. Mainly, there was this character who I threw in because I wanted a compelling character arc on the side. And also because charming thieves are always a good idea, and space operas require rogues. I mean, where would Star Wars be without Han Solo? Nowhere. So Dar Beauregard was born. 

Drawing by me.
He thinks he’s so great…*shakes head*

(Another thing that has stuck around from the original draft is the lapis lazuli motif, which I stole that from the Epic of Gilgamesh.)

Draft #2: The Prince's Pendant and The Prince of Erdania
c. 2015

I told you I drafted Amid a Million Stars super quickly, right? Basically I went into it trying to write a first draft that was trash, because apparently that's what Real Writers did, or something. *shrugs* Anyway I took redrafting + edits very VERY seriously, and relatively slowly: I had this big old binder to hold my double-spaced chapters as I printed them out, and I filled it with editing notes and character profiles and outlines and illustrations and I-don't-know-what-else. 

I shudder to think that that binder remains in the closet of my childhood bedroom somewhere, just waiting for the blackmailers to find it. 

Nothing changed too dramatically in this rewrite. It just got bigger and more complex and more, well, dramatic. The traitorous character got some semblance of motivation--by which I mean, he started to become an actual fleshed-out character?--but his motivations still weren't very good. The protagonist was still vanilla, her best friend was still way more fun to write than she was, Dar Beauregard was still everybody's favorite, and the saintly prince still died in the end. 

I added more characters, because obviously the way to fix an overly complex plot is by complicating things with extra people to keep track of. *rolls eyes* 

The best thing that happened in this draft was...

...you know what I don't know.

I think this may be the low point. 

The prince got killed over his NECKLACE, for crying out loud. It wasn't even a MAGICAL necklace, it was a POLITICAL SYMBOL. *pounds head on desk*

I almost want to say the sequel, The Prince of Erdania, was better because at least we switched protagonists? Due to the original prince's tragic murder, our good old fighter pilot Raphael Novarex found himself suddenly in command of a kingdom, during a war. (This is what happens when you tie succession to the possession of a necklace: you end up with woefully underprepared monarchs.) 

I was still beating a dead horse with some very-not-subtle allegory, so although my Book 2 prince didn't die a sacrificial death like the Book 1 prince, he did get nailed to a dungeon wall. *digs the heels of her hands into her eyes* 

Draft #3: Wherein We Suddenly Became a Series of Dystopian...Novelas?
c. 2017

I know it was 2017 because 2017 is the year I graduated high school. And graduating from high school makes you do strange things. Like enter writing contests for scholarship money. And deciding that your long-term teenage WIP would be a PERFECT FIT for said writing contests, provided you....subjected the poor creature to such extensive edits that it was no longer recognizable as its original self. *sighs*

All the sudden Dar Beauregard wasn't just a gentleman thief living his best life on some remote planet with his band of thugs. 

He was a prince who had, due to some Severely Traumatizing Childhood Events, run far away from the palace and signed on with a bunch of revolutionaries; and now, at the tender age of 20, he was going back to the palace for the express purpose of kidnapping & drugging his twin brother so that he could take said twin brother's place on the throne.

...I forget what exactly he was supposed to do on that throne. Somehow it was going to be Very Bad. It wasn't just, like, passing better laws for the poor, it was more along the lines of assassinating all the innocent royalty and blowing up the entire city. Because #revolution, y'know? 

Sometimes I look back on this phase of the story and just...shake my head.

Because WHAT MADE ME THINK THIS WAS THE SAME STORY.

THE CONFLICT WAS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

THE CHARACTERS...had all the same names and the same physical appearance 

but their CIRCUMSTANCES AND MOTIVATIONS AND BACKSTORIES AND GOALS were all COMPLETELY DIFFERENT than they had ever been before. 

HOW, MEGAN. HOW WAS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE A REVISION. WHY DID YOU NOT JUST START OVER FROM SCRATCH.

I think the answer has something to do with the fact that deep down inside my heart, I knew The Prince's Pendant was fundamentally broken? but I didn't wanna say goodbye to the characters? 

anywho this phase happened but it's over now so never mind.

(did i mention there was a tragic & mostly unnecessary death in the end of this one, too? this time it wasn't the prince, though, it was Dar Beauregard's best friend Biff. who was a lot like the current Dick except older & wiser & rougher around the edges, & missing a front tooth from a time he saved little baby not-street-smart ex-palace Dar from a bunch of street-smart bullies.) 

Draft #4: The Comic Space Opera, Seasons 1-3

2019-2022

FINALLY WE FIGURED IT OUT.

Dar Beauregard and Company were never MEANT to be part of a serious story.

They were MEANT to run wild and crazy and free over a land of sunshine and flowers and Simon & Garfunkel references. They were meant to drive around in flying teal Cadillacs. They were meant to frequent pizza parlors and care incredibly much about coffee. They were meant to operate on the same laws of physics that apply to Loony Toons characters. They were meant to be a combination of TV Westerns, LEGO Ninjago, and 80s action shows. They were meant to live life to a Dean Martin soundtrack. They were meant to fall in love at first sight, to be grouchy misanthropes, to be arrogant fops, to be maniacal pizza men. They were meant to be ridiculous.

See this Pinterest board.

I wrote Season 1 of the Comic Space Opera with the mentality that I didn't care, anymore, about anything but having fun. The plot didn't have to make sense, the technology didn't have to be consistent, the writing didn't have to be particularly good. But it had to be FUN. 

(It's low-key stressful being in college, see, and I was really burnt out on writing depressing historical novels about alcoholic aviators and their traumatized little sisters.)

But see, once I threw the desire to write Sellable Material out the window, the strangest thing happened.

I fell more in love with the story than ever.

With the characters in control, the plots began to make sense.

Book 1 wasn't thematically cohesive, but Book 2 actually had an articulate conflict, and Book 3...was actually kind of satisfying? 

Like it actually kind of wrapped up in a way that made me...want to go back and fix the whole thing?

Which meant--

DARN IT. I HAVE TO REWRITE BOOK 1 AGAIN.

Draft #5 (and hopefully final): The Kidnapping of Prince Ferdinand 

2022-present

I now knew that the thing holding CSO Seasons 1-3 together was the quest to find Prince Ferdinand; which meant, if I wanted to revise 500+ pages into a somewhat neat and tiny debut novel, the quest to rescue Ferdy had to be front and center.

That meant cutting out a lot of subplots (and fluffy scenes that never knew what they were doing in the first place), which was a little bit painful.

It also meant rewriting large sections of the story, especially the first half of the story. Which was more fun than it was headache. 

And in the end it brought me...here! 

NEXT STEPS

I'm printing out the book so I can take a red pen to it. My copy should get here at the beginning of February. Which isn't soon enough. I WANT IT NOW. *pouts*

...But honestly, a few weeks away from the characters/prose/plot is probably not long enough of a break before diving into edits, so I shall endeavor to hold my piece. (Peace? Piece? Wut are idioms.)

As is the way with drafts (even fifth drafts), the manuscript will require a lot of editing, and not just line edits. The shape of the story right now is Weird with a capital W, guys: for the first half there are about five groups of characters with their own narrative points of view, and it's a lot to juggle in a thematically cohesive way...and then all the sudden somewhere in the second half of the novel, those groups are consolidated and there's basically one point of view with a very specific goal in mind. It feels like...it feels like the first half of the book is a branched-out bush with plenty of foliage, and the second half of the book is a single skinny tree trunk with very few branches and practically NO leaves just sticking straight out of the bush in the middle. 

We have work to do.

At the same time, editing is a very different type of brain work than drafting, and drafting is....more fun. And a major goal of this story-world is still to keep me sane. So now that the drafting part of The Kidnapping of Prince Ferdinand is done, I might have to start drafting something else. 

Maybe...Sofi's Boys? (If you know, you know.) (It's a spin-off from the Comic Space Opera, and is considerably more serious in mood and tone.)  I've peeked at my Pinterest board for that one and I am low-key thrilled at the thought of working on it again. My poor moody character-children, I haven't given them real attention since, like, June, and I kind of left them in a variety of painful places. *pats them on the head*

ANYWAY.

It's exciting stuff, having more or less unchartered territory in front of you.

Well, my dears. It's late and my computer is about to die. If you made it this far, thank you for rejoicing with me in my moment of momentary victory! You are a good friend. I will keep you posted with an update on how edits are going, once edits actually get underway.

Chat with me! How are your creative projects going?