I finished the first draft of Lost & Found this week and the writing process for this novel allowed me to finally find the correct voice and tone for all of the Gabby Wells novels. It was weird to me that it took two novels (that have since been trashed) and three novellas to find the voice for the overall storyline. But, that’s just what happened.

When I was about half way through Lost & Found, when I was making Gabby’s life miserable to biblical proportions, it started to feel right. When I was actually tapping the words on the keyboard, all of the elements started to coalesce and I felt a creative momentum building. When I was done with the draft, it made me realize two really important things:

The first was that I had to now match the tone with the other novellas. It actually won’t be that hard in Skyway. But The Homecoming Incident was much lighter and would need to grow darker and more gritty. I have some ideas which will help and they tie into the second thing I realized.

The second thing was that my brother Paul was right and all of these novellas should actually be turned into novels. That means adding an additional 10-20k words to each one. With the new tone and approach, it makes sense that the scope needs to widen and it would need to get darker. I also want to do a better job of layering in the spiritual elements Gabby deals with too. Not in a preachy way (I hate that) but in the overall world of the story. It’ll make more sense if/when you read the books.

This continual shifting in approach does bring with it a level of frustration, however. I feel like the novels are like a bathtub with the plug pulled and no matter how much I write, the words still spin down the drain. It’s like I’ll never get finished. But, I have to move forward because these decisions are the right thing to do. I just want to be able to check off “done” on one of these manuscripts so I can move onto the editing/book cover phase and get them to market.

And I’m sure, at some point, years from now when all of the novels are completed, people will comment on how it all seemed so planned out from the beginning and I’ll just laugh and send them to my blog entries which show the continuous alterations we’ve made since starting this process years ago.

I just have to keep plugging along. I have some time over the holiday weekend and I haven’t decided whether to start on the third novella or rewrite The Homecoming Incident first in order to be able to check something off my list. My heart tells me I should start on the third novella Tears & Miracles, but my impatient brain is telling me to rewrite the first one. I’ll let you know what I came up with.