I Finished the First Draft of Live and Impersonated

I think I wrote the last line of the first draft (technically the 10th draft) of Live and Impersonated this month during a Writers’ Athenaeum writing sprint. Here it is:

The room winked away as she passed out of the moment and into a new adventure.

Ugh, it’s terrible, right?—don’t answer that.

One writer I know is running headlong toward publishing their first novel, having only done one round of edits, talking about the book like it’s a work of perfection. The more I write, the more I find myself agonizing over whether or not it’s good or needs to be taken out back and shot.

I say Live and Impersonated is in its 10th draft because I really have written 9 others, but this was a from-scratch rewrite after months of training and mentorship from Randy Surles and the other editors at Writers’ Athenaeum. My book needed a major reboot and I’m very happy with it. I was able to turn around a from-scratch draft in 3 months thanks to Jessica Brody’s fast drafting method.

It’s a far, far cry from publishable, but I started with Chapter 1, working off of a novel blueprint document (essentially a fancy outline), and made it to the end of the epilogue.

Part of me can’t believe it—sort of the same feeling I had when I got the email about the Notable Honorable Mention for the Page One Prize. I set out to achieve this thing and I’m making real progress…and somehow it’s shocking! 😅

I spent the last week world building. I’m not sure how many writers do world building after the first draft, and I’m not quite sure I recommend it yet, but it has been a ton of fun. The world of the White Horse novels is very different from the one I started with.

Characters have died—well, I mean, they now don’t exist because I cut them from earlier versions. My male main character, Tim has taken on most of the characteristics of another character who I completely fell in love with, so much so, I gave him the lead part and sent old, flimsy Tom packing.

And I now have a female protagonist as well who will likely be the lead in book 2 of the series. Where I thought the series was going to be about secreting away people from the past to preserve mankind’s future, that had become barely a subplot. Humanity has bigger problems, y’all. 2844 is rough, kind of like my 2026. Oy.

This Summer…

It has been an Arnold Palmer of epic proportions—bitter and sweet in ways that make my head spin just trying to contemplate it. In the midst of it all, I’ve been getting to the office every day, writing most of the morning and afternoon until my creative energy is sapped and other work takes over.

I think Stephen King once said of life’s interruptions to the writing life, something like, “It’s the bit of grit in the oyster that becomes a pearl.”

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Oh, it’s been gritty. But thanks to tech like Scrivener and reMarkable and the ability to duct tape them together with AI, I’ve stayed very productive in the midst of the chaos.

Next up, I’m wading into revisions already. My editors graciously extended my deadline to December 1 to turn in a draft, and I’m going to try to cram in a couple of rounds of revision before they get it. Right now my primary goal is to get the manuscript in a solid enough state that my ideal reader and number one fan, Amanda Fashbaugh, can read it for the first time. She has read past versions of the book, but this is a whole new animal.

In the year to come, I hope to implement my developmental editors’ feedback, find some beta readers, make a few more polishing edits as needed, and publish in the fall of 2027. It seems doable.

By then, I’ll also be well into writing Book 2 which has a working title now!

Realtime

Eh? What do you think? Sexy? Alluring? Vague? Drab? Take it out back and shoot it, you say? Okay. [Chambers slug in shotgun.]

In between Live and Impersonated and Realtime, I think I will return to my zombie story I was writing earlier in the year. It’s a sort of History Channel’s Alone meets The Walking Dead meets The Hunger Games. My wife and I have been watching season after season of Alone, and I just love the idea of the show’s format being the framework for a story set in a zombie-ravaged future. I’ve been writing it with the intention of releasing the chapters episodically, so I may just peck away at that, but I also want to submit some short story work. Maybe I’ll do both…?

If you’d like to be a beta reader for Live and Impersonated, please let me know. If you have other thoughts, feedback on Realtime as a title, likes or dislikes of my zombie Alone concept or anything else, I’d like to hear it.

Or how about this: what are you reading? I’m finishing Connie Willis’s Lincoln’s Dreams and am about 25% into my first read of Stephen King’s The Shining. Let me know what you’re reading in the What Do You Think? section here!