The Woven Timeline

With Broken Patterns on the way to publication, I’m feeling nostalgic. I mean, I started this book in 2014, and it’s just now coming out. It’s also a little weird, because I’m almost done with Starting Chains and about to be working on Missing Stitches. It’s all coming back full circle.

So I wanted to walk through the steps I’ve taken with Woven so far, broken down by year. I’ll be doing updates as the book progress, of course, but I just want to take a minute and read the mile marker.

2013

I wrote the rough draft of Broken Patterns in six weeks. I had never written anything that long before. The novel I wrote before was just barely novel size. I had to add a whole secondary plot line just to puff it up. Broken Patterns was huge, though! It was over 800 pages long hand, double spaced.

Then I got fired from the shoe store, and my daughter was kidnapped by her paternal father from school. That’s when Broken Patterns saved my life. It was all I had to cling to while I was trying desperately to save my family.

2014

In which everything had a happy ending. I spent a good amount of time cleaning up the novel before Woven, and started trying to submit it.

I spent seven months writing the second draft of Broken Patterns. I was so sick and tired of it after that I jumped into Starting Chains with both feet for NANO that year.

I did write 50,000 words in November, but that wasn’t half of that book. I threw the thing away halfway through and started from scratch twice. It took six months, total, to finish that draft, that spanned five composition notebooks.

In the meantime, my daughter came home, and I landed the best damn day job ever.

2015

Most of 2015 was spent finishing Starting Chains, but when that was done I wrote the final draft of Broken Patterns. It was finished, for good (not really) in November. I put it away with a sigh, only to pull it back out to add a prologue and epilogue when I was finished with the second draft of Starting Chains and realized I’d need to foreshadow some of the things going on. The Final draft of Broken Patterns took me six months, then another three weeks for a final polish. When it was done, I jumped right into the second draft of Starting Chains. That took me into 2016.

My life was pretty awesome this year. Mostly I was still recovering from the two years before. I did get promoted at my day job. And, we moved into our first ever house! Our family also gained a member. Our dog, Oliver.

2016

This year isn’t over yet, of course. But so far I’ve finished the second draft of Starting Chains, which took a total of five and a half months. I think it took less time than the first one because I threw it away twice during the rough draft process.

After that I wrote the rough draft for Missing Stitches. I am really apprehensive, because it seemed so easy to write it. Which probably means it’s predictable and boring as hell. All told, it took me three months.

Now I’m working on the final draft of Starting Chains, in the hopes of getting it done before I start on the rewrites for Broken Patterns. If it doesn’t take too long, I’ll start on draft two of Missing Stitches after that.

No estimated release date yet.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.