The Adventures of Millie Continue

I had suspended working on the sequel to “Millie’s Adventures in Time” while I was getting said title published. It took longer than I thought to accomplish that once I decided to go forward with self-publishing and drop the search for an agent. So recently, I reread everything that I had written so far on “Millie’s Further Adventures in Time.” I was somewhat amazed at how much I had already written and I made a discovery.

I had completely forgotten that I was trying out a different way of writing the sequel from how I had written the first novel. The first one was written rather doggedly, one chapter after the other. I had to frequently go back and reread previous chapters to remind myself what a certain character had done or said on a particular topic, or just what had transpired before I could move on.

For the sequel, I was trying a different tactic. I set up a number of plot lines, gave them titles to help with saving them and retrieving them and then started writing. I’d write several chapters about certain characters and certain elements of the plot until I came to a point of no more inspiration at that time. Then I would move onto a different plot line. It helped to keep it fresh for me and required a lot less backtracking.

I think it must have been working well because once I finished rereading what I had put into the manuscript, I had this niggling little memory of there being more and I looked through the file and found about 30 pages worth that still needed to be fit into the manuscript.

I thought “wow” this is really great. I have all this “new” material to add to the manuscript. The only problem was, in what order should I add those chapters. Should it be two from this plot line and then one from that? I realized that this part was going to be harder than I remembered.

I reread all those “bonus” chapters and started making notes about how the chapters should be ordered. It required a couple days of fairly intensive work, but I got it done and it looks pretty good.

I haven’t quite decided if I should continue in this manner. The basic pros and cons are about even in my mind. I’d have to assign weights to each one in order to figure it out from a statistical standpoint. I’m not sure I have that much patience.

My gut tells me to continue in the same manner. After all, the sequel is already more than half as long as the first novel. Of course, I have no way of knowing how long this one will actually be. But I tend to have a lot to say most of the time (the length of this post should be an indication), so I have every reason to expect it to be at least as long as the first one. Since it has gone well so far, why not. Right?

I guess only time will tell on this one. I’ll just take it as it goes and see what transpires.