Debrief Doc
Unpacking the process of serializing Remembrance
NB: If you receive this newsletter in your inbox, you’ll need to open this piece in your browser to read the entire thing. Just fair warning.
When I used to work as an event planner, we would start a Google doc as soon as we began planning a conference. This “Debrief Doc” was a place for us to dump important thoughts and notes throughout the conference planning process. It served several purposes:
we could discover and record what areas were places of improvement, where our strengths were, and what quirks to anticipate for future events
we could jot down notes about particularly helpful committee members we wanted to get involved next year, helpful or difficult relationships, alternate options for catering, travel notes about the local airport and hotel, etc.
when we met with our committee and our supervisor after the event had been wrapped up, we knew what we needed to talk through
we had one place to record a summary of all the feedback we received throughout the conference-planning process and on the post-conference survey
we could easily onboard a new coordinator when staffing shifts required a change in coordinator on a given event
What I am hoping to offer you here is my Debrief Doc for Remembrance: cleaned up, of course, but containing all my notes and thoughts, all the things I want to chat with you about after you know the whole story. My hope is that it will serve me well as I plan for another novel here on Substack (after this writing hangover passes LOL), and that it will help any of you who are planning to write your own long-form stories here.
A final note before we dive in: this post is and will remain free, even after the serial itself goes behind a paywall; however, paid subscribers will receive some extra goodies—I’ll explain more below, but if you’re interested in those, or if you want to read Remembrance beyond the end of this month (April 2024), you can upgrade to a paid subscription ($2.50/month or $25/year) here:
I don’t pitch paid subs often, and I’ll only throw in one more reminder, way down at the bottom of this post, but I will say that I am immensely grateful for the support of paid subscribers. I want to wax poetic about how paid subscriptions support my writing habits, but I’m going to be frank with y’all: I will continue to write stories whether or not I get paid for it, and all paid subscriptions help us to cover our family’s bills. I’m not sure if that makes a more or less compelling case, but there you have it.
I’ve tried to set the price such that, for the time it takes to read the novel, the cost will be around the cost of an ebook (if you subscribe monthly) or a paperback book (if you subscribe annually). I do have plans for further serials and one-off short stories over the course of the coming year, so I hope it feels like you’re getting your money’s worth. If you, like us, are in a time of penny-pinching, when you’re better served buying the proverbial cup of coffee than a novel online, would you consider sharing Blinking Blue Line with a friend?
Alternatively, I have a Beta Reader Survey that I’d love for you to complete. There’s more on this at the end, but as previously mentioned, this is a long email, and I don’t want it to get lost, so I’m dropping the link here. Scroll to the bottom if you want to read more.
Finally, all asks aside, I want to thank you for welcoming Leah and crew into your weekends, whether for one chapter or for all of them, over the last seven months. It was HUGE for me to show up, week after week, and work on the same project. I’m looking forward to a time of less commitment when I’ll have the bandwidth to explore some flash fiction and short stories, but also, I want to celebrate what a win this is for my creative life. Thanks for coming along for the ride—it wouldn’t have been the same without you.
Alright, let’s jump right in.
Caveat Lector: There Be Spoilers!
Getting Started
I first decided that I wanted to rewrite this novel during the first
competition last summer.1 I’d been on Substack for a couple of months and was enjoying getting my toes wet in reading serialized fiction. The stories I wrote for the competition were sent in the MIND “universe” (one that has lived rent-free in my head for a decade) because I didn’t want to waste time worldbuilding with the short turnaround, and picking these characters back up for the first time in ten years felt like coming home.I did, I’ll be honest, absolutely no research on storytelling structure, plot planning methods, or anything. I more or less just took the outline of the first iteration of this novel, updated it, and started writing. This will be, most likely, the first item of business when doing edits on the story as a whole. I recently read up on the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet that
mentioned in conjunction with her latest masterpiece, Freelance & Fishmaids… and let’s just say that it was beautiful and symbolic and symmetric and poignant, and I think I was 0/0 on all of those attributes. Who knew there were blank outlines out there on The Internet (TM) to help new writers figure themselves out. Lots of room to grow!Preparing to Write
Once I’d decided that I did want to tell this story here, I started thinking through the pre-writing tasks. When I originally wrote it back in 2013, I way over-outlined, to the point that writing the novel itself was boring and stressful because I already felt like I’d written the story. When the time came to write the sequel, I couldn’t even bring myself to get back the first few pages, for much the same reason.
This time around, I was determined not to make the same mistake. I copied and pasted clean copies of the original outline (as well as of the final draft) into a new folder so that I could really mess around with the material as much as I wanted to.
First step was rewriting chapter summaries—just updating chapter summaries from my 2013/14 outline. I didn’t change the number of chapters, the major plot skeleton, or anything like that. At this point, I was still thinking I would just edit/retell the same story and update it a little bit, using large chunks of the original text.
As I worked on the chapter summaries, I couldn’t escape asking important questions about writing a standalone story vs. setting up for a sequel. The first time I wrote this story, it was going to have a sequel and a concurrent side story, to form a “trilogy” of sorts. I decided that (1) I didn’t have enough material to fill out a sequel; (2) I wanted to majorly narrow the scope of the story; and (3) I didn’t want to commit myself to a sequel and then burn out or get bored and feel obliged to write it anyway.2 As a result, I started thinking about how to tighten up the plot so that it would be able to stand alone—what would need to be kept, what would need to be cut, and how was I going to fill in the blanks?
Shortly after cobbling together a new outline, or maybe even as I was working on it, I read
’ posts on How to Write a Serial (and eventually his Story Loom discussion as well). At this point, I reread my outline for themes and picked out a few that I really wanted to lean on. I worked through the characters and their motivations, and made notes about who might get cut as I wrote. Overall, I cut a lot of stuff and added a lot of stuff at this stage.From there, I blocked out “acts” or large-scale subplot arcs, which were framed in terms of the driving character in Leah’s plot and the themes I wanted to explore. The end of each arc represented a sort of pivot point in Leah’s decision-making, in her trust, in her understanding of what was happening around her. These were fluid and ended up overlapping a little bit, but it was a very helpful framework for me to use.
After the high-level outline was completed, I moved into a tiered outline for each arc. I blocked out basic chapters and plot points within each arc, but I kept it vague so I could give myself a lot of flexibility to add or combine chapters. As I was writing, I would add notes as I began to plant seeds of foreshadowing. I especially wanted to ensure that I made the external references I wanted to make, and that anything I alluded to in an early chapter got fleshed out in the appropriate later chapter. (More on this below!) This flexible structure was really helpful to me, as in the past I have been a chronic over-outliner, leading to boredom and burnout when it came time to actually write the story.3
This is where I’m excited to share my “bonus resource” for paid subs, which is the PDF of my planning document in its final form. I have literally no idea if anyone will want or care about this, but I’m including it here anyway for kicks.
I can’t give you a time-lapse video or a “tracked changes” version of this document (maybe next serial!) that would really let you in on my thought process as I was writing… but I can offer the next best thing.4 I hope you enjoy it!
Actual Writing: Write Ahead or Week-by-Week?
At this point, I finally sat down and started working on the first couple of chapters. As I prepared to officially/publicly introduce the project, I decided to reach out to a few “alpha readers” for the first chapter. Their feedback really helped me feel confident in launching. It gave me a sense of what readers would be hooked by, help me set the tone and style for the story, and affirmed me in my previously-personal sense that there was, in fact, a story here with good bones.
For the first month or two, I stayed ahead of readers by two or three chapters—I’d built up a pre-stock before launching and made a few minor edits to each chapter based on the response each weekend, but the chapters had been mostly written in advance.
As others have said, there’s definitely a benefit to remaining ahead of readers; however, over a project as long as this one (seven months in total!), I knew that I was going to get to a week-by-week phase eventually. This is where my flexible outline really came in handy—when it got to the point that I was writing each chapter after the previous chapter had been released, I had a strong outline to fall back on. I’d stashed all the notes about the conversations I needed to have, the foreshadowing or fulfillment I wanted to incorporate, and the references I wanted to make.
Many (dare I say most?) of the chapters fell together quite easily, albeit late on Friday nights. Other than a few pacing issues, I really felt quite confident throughout with the publishing schedule. That being said, I am a stubborn little turd sometimes, and there was no way that I was going to let a weekend go by without dropping a new chapter, just as a matter of personal pride. So there were a few later-than-was-prudent Friday nights when I was just really struggling to get things written.
For me, the one of the issues I ran into with the write-by-week set-up was the side-characters who didn’t really get fleshed out, many of whom didn’t even get names. Especially towards the end, when I was feeling a little antsy to be done and more on to more fun things5, the side characters rarely got the flare I wish I’d given them. Something to do in post!
Now, all that to say, I still would prefer to stay a couple weeks ahead of readers. I just don’t think it’s feasible for me in this current season, especially over a long term project. But I did finally have a week (much later in the story) that the muse struck immediately after finishing the previous chapter, and I wrote the whole next chapter by Tuesday afternoon. That chapter was able to go through several rounds of edits, and I was able to sit down and talk through some big things with
… and wow, y’all, I was shocked. Putting time and effort into revisions is a delight, and leads to a much stronger narrative.Actual Writing: Alpha Reader // Developmental Editor Feedback
Speaking of my dear husband James, throughout this process he served as my sounding board // alpha readers // developmental editor. We spent many a night talking through plot, characters, backstory, front story, and even the metaphysics and physiology of the tech used at the Institute. He really helped me strengthen the plot throughout, especially the ending.6 (We have lots of conversations about endings in literature.) We don’t always agree on storytelling craft, so it was interesting to get feedback from someone who would write this story very differently. He mentioned one day that Leah had, ya know, become very vanilla after the suppression—this hadn’t been my intention, but I could see how the contrast between this and Betrayal would lead to that impression.
Rather than getting down about it, I tried to lean into it, to take that weakness and turn it into a strength. After Leah’s memories returned, I wanted her to have a renewed purpose, a stronger and more vivid character after… In the end, after writing the rest of the story (and further discussions with James), my hope is to make this “vanilla-ization” a canonical thing. (You see this alluded to in the Epilogue.)
Essentially, having James as a sounding board allowed me to ask questions like, “Leah and Peter flirting at the end, yes or no?” before I even got the point of soliciting reader feedback. (Leah and Peter did not, of course, flirt at the end. Special Agent Robert McDowell made sure of that.)
Actual Writing: Endings
I was grateful for James’ willingness to “talk shop” throughout, but especially towards the end of the novel. Endings are hard! I knew from the get-go how I wanted to end the story, but the specifics developed as I talked with James and as we got closer to the last chapter. The Epilogue, in particular, felt like a fun twist to the perfect happy ending in Chapter 30, but it was daunting to write until I sat down and really got in a groove with it. I was very grateful for James’ help workshopping both the idea and the specific text and tone.
Unexpectedly, writing became significantly more challenging for me after the big reveal about Leah’s memories in Chapter 21.7 Part of this is that I’m never terribly confident in my ability to conceive of, let alone execute, satisfying endings that fit the scale of the story, especially in a story like Remembrance, where there isn’t a final “Big Boss” fight at the end. Part of this was also, I learned, my writer’s instinct alerting me to the fact that something needed to change.
I pushed through for a few weeks, but as we got closer and closer to the sting operation, I started noticing a lot of resistance and hesitation in myself, and I frequently spent entire evenings procrastinating with non-writing but story-adjacent tasks.8 I did poll the hive mind, which helped but didn’t solve my resistance:
I had drafted about 2000-2500 words of chapter 28 when I realized that Leah had no character development, no lesson learned, no real sacrifice made AFTER her memories returned—it was down to business and all success from there. So I panic-texted a couple of friends and then sat down with James to workshop a new ending. We came up with the version you read, and all of the sudden, the “stuckness” was gone and the words flowed and I was much more satisfied with the direction of the chapter and the story overall.
Resistance—> Writer’s Block—> Something isn’t working—> Need to workshop plot, framing, character development, etc.—>Go find James and talk his ear off for an hour—>Write more.
This then proceeded to happen almost weekly during the last month of writing—I would get stuck trying to write something in a particular way; I would talk through the chapter outline with James, and we would make some tweaks (often very minor ones!) to the structure; and then, the words would flow. I cannot recommend enough having someone to sound ideas off of while writing in a sort of developmental editor capacity. My editing load will be much lighter because of the changes we made before writing that I won’t now have to make after writing.
I also would be remiss as a writer (and a wife) if I failed to mention the serial he is currently writing, which is titled To Kill a Queen’s Dragon and which explores the knight-slaying-dragon trope through the lens of a ten-year-old boy who’s run away from home. It’s a wild, imaginative, poignant romp through the world of Corchrist, and I’ve been honored to serve as his alpha reader and developmental editor as he’s written the story—and read it aloud to his class of eager fourth-graders!
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 1 to whet your appetite:
“A beast it surely is, dear friend, but perhaps not a lion,” the knight said as a smile broke across his face. “I think a sword might not be quite the tool to slay such a one. Hand-to-hand combat seems much more appropriate.” With that, the great man sheathed his sword and merrily walked towards the cat with his hand extended. In a few cautious strides, the man had knelt next to the ‘beast’ and began to carefully stroke its head and back tenderly.
“It… it was huge! Before, I mean. What happened to it?” Bill asked aghast.
“Surely, you must understand. This awful man-eater came chasing after you for scraps he smelled in your pack, and, caught unawares by a wild animal, your fear made it seem more fearsome than it really was.”
“But it was a lion! How would I mistake a cat for a lion?”
“Stranger things have happened to those traveling alone in the woods. You’re lucky that it wasn’t a troll or a goblin.”
“Those don’t exist. Dan Calloway from school said that they’re just in stories to scare babies.”
“This Dan sounds like quite the little goblin himself, perhaps. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Sir Phillip. What is your name, may I ask, and what brings you into this forest with no fear of evil creatures? Is your family nearby? Your father will certainly worry if he heard you screaming and can’t find you.”
“I’m Bill, and my parents aren’t here.”
I regularly laugh out loud when he reads me the chapter he’s just written for his class, and I’m fully prepared to cry like a baby when we reach the end of the story.
Actual Writing: Craftsmanship, Serial Etiquette, and the Hive Mind
A few months in, just around the time that I was starting to feel constrained by word count and a few other precedents I’d begun to set,
posted this “Top Myths about Serial Fiction” note that I found this really helpful and freeing:I think this was just before the chapter where Leah calls her mom, which came out much shorter than anticipated, and it was nice to be given permission to post it as it was, rather than trying to cut another chapter in half or add unnecessary fluff to get this chapter up to length.
I do wonder, in retrospect, what would have happened if I’d approached each chapter as more or less a self-contained short story, as opposed to just “the next bit of story before we reach a new plot point” or “the newest conversation of the week”. I definitely approached it as the latter, and would have been interested to see what would have changed if I’d gone in with the mindset of the former. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything. Maybe it wouldn’t have fit. But I’m curious.
I also was tremendously grateful for the ability to hop over to Substack Notes and ask for craft-specific suggestions and receive a variety of helpful answers and perspectives. The fiction-writing community on Notes is supportive and always willing to share their advice. I particularly enjoyed the not-for-publication writing prompts that I was offered—thinking through some of these really helped me shift my mindset about a few key scenes and characters.
Actual Writing: Boring to Write, Boring to Read?
The middle of the story began to worry me—I was writing week by week, following my outline, and planting seeds. Some weeks, it felt like important groundwork for future chapters. Other weeks, it felt like an absolute slog. Some of those middle chapters definitely reflect this, and I find myself worried that people won’t stick through to the end because the middle chapters felt like a slog to write sometimes.
It was hard to tell in this first write-through what would end up being fluff, and what would end up being a critical seed. I’m really looking forward to going back through now that the draft is completed because it will be much easier to look at those scenes with a clear eye and decide what to keep and what to cut.
Managing Feedback: Chat Function
I very much went into this process with the goal of not only sharing this story, but also of receiving practical, actionable feedback to help improve my writing. This isn’t how everyone on Substack treats their fiction newsletter, so I made it a point to ask for feedback, rather than assuming people would offer it (or relying solely on comments and shares to gauge my skill level). The primary way I asked for and received feedback throughout the story was in my subscriber chat, which can be found on my homepage.
Running the chat helped keep the comments on each chapter from getting overwhelmed with my questions or concerns about the way the story was written. At times it did feel redundant, but in the weeks when I had a lot of uncertainty or questions about the flow of a chapter, the pacing of the story, the emotional “punch” of a scene, having a designated space to ask those questions was helpful.
About halfway through, I stopped posting every single chapter in the chat and started posting only when I had questions or wanted feedback, which decreased in frequency through the middle of the story and increased again as I tried to “land the plane gently,” so to speak.
That being said, if I continue to utilize the subscriber chat for feedback in the future, I think I would change a few things:
Offer more pointed questions, rather than just a vague call for “responses” or “feelings”. The weeks when I did this proved most helpful by a long shot.
Tailor my questions to examine areas where I feel weak as a writer, as well as areas where I feel strong.
Consider linking to the chat at the end of each chapter, rather than hoping people subscribe, then receive a notification about the new chat thread, and then choose to hop over and respond.
I’m still not sold on the chat-thread-as-workshop as a whole. The other feedback option I’m testing is included here. If you enjoyed reading Remembrance (or if you didn’t, but you see potential in it!), would you consider taking a few minutes to share your feedback with me? In many ways, publishing here on Substack has felt like gathering a beta reader community, and I would be honored if you’d consider helping me out with me “beta reader survey”.
None of the questions are required, so it’s easy to skip past anything you don’t have feedback on. My goal isn’t to receive essays, but rather, to gather helpful insights that will allow me tell the story more effectively. These questions cover the story as a whole, and they’re written to help me identify areas that will need editing—either problem areas to smooth out, or strengths to really highlight—as I work on the second draft and prepare for publication.
Managing Feedback: Responding to Your Reactions
I loved getting to see you all call attention in the comments to some of the themes I was wanting to explore. Here’s my list, in case you’re interested:
Memory & Identity
Relationships & Responsibility
Truth, Lies, & Rumors
Justice & Mercy
Control & Anxiety
Perception & Reality
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how these played out in the story. Did you feel yourself wrestling with these dynamics as you read?
The biggest, most unexpected thing I saw in both the chat and the comments was y’all’s response to Sarah. You really latched onto her, which was helpful and annoying because she was by far my weakest link and the wild card I was most unsure how to play. Sarah and Connor’s roles changed the most from the first iteration of this novel to this one, and while I wasn’t ready to get rid of them entirely, I was also not sure how they would fit in with the rest of the plot. Around Chapter 8-10, I decided that I needed to give Sarah a little bit of space. I’d run myself in circles trying to establish that she was trustworthy, only to continue to see suspicion in the comments.
Again, this was very helpful and also very annoying.
My attitude in creating some space between Sarah and Leah was, essentially, we’ll bring her back later and see what happens. (This all goes to show that
’s point about character motivations is so important—if you don’t know why your characters are in the story, and if you don’t know what they want, then your writing will reveal this and your readers will have Q U E S T I O N S.)All that being said, it was neat to see some love for Connor too—I seriously considered cutting him in this draft because having both him and Sarah seemed redundant, but I’m glad I didn’t. Almost every time he got some airtime, he got universal approval. I’d love to draw him out a little more, if possible, in another round of editing.
Overall, it was really, really helpful for me to get real-time feedback on what was happening in y’all’s heads as readers, what y’all were anticipating and expecting—I could choose to play up/play into those, or subvert them. I could try (although not always successfully, as we’ve established) to offer real reassurance when your theories were going off the rails, or I could follow them and see where it led.
The two areas where I most benefitted from feedback were:
Emotional dynamics—was I accomplishing what I was trying to accomplish with the paranoia sequences, for example, and was Leah’s dread after Sarah asked for space helpful in fleshing out their relationship?
Pacing—knowing how much room I had to string you along vs give you answers, knowing that I wasn’t spending too too much time on establishing the relationships in the midst of the plot moving forward, especially at the beginning.
These also happen to be areas where I feel less confident, so I was very grateful to be able to gauge and make adjustments throughout. This is another reason why editing feels less daunting (and why I feel less burned out)—I have some idea already of what needs to be adjusted and where/how.
Trivia and Easter Eggs
Someone mentioned or asked about the significance (if any) of the characters’ names. For most of them, they were just chosen randomly, ten years ago, and I didn’t bother to change them. However, I did choose to change or add onto a few names, and those do have some specific background:
Leonora “Leah” Harvey: Leonora as a female version of Leonard—St. Leonard is the patron saint of prisoners; Harvey meaning (if you take the long way around) “battle worthy”. (Leah’s name in the original draft was, somewhat arbitrarily, Gianna.)
Jude Pierucci: Jude’s name (and his status as a “junior”) both originated in my short story Betrayal, which is linked below. This was one of my GWC ‘23 stories, and I wanted to play up the duality of St. Jude and Judas. I called explicit attention to this in Betrayal through a memory of Jude’s Nonna (whose lasagna featured in Remembrance), because Jude spends much of the story feeling stuck in the role of betrayer—will he betray Leah or his father?9 (Jude’s name in the original draft was Jake, and he was not a junior.)
Sarah Advena Winfrey: Advena means “stranger” according to names.com, which I chose around chapter 8 or 9 when I finally decided that Sarah would not be a friend from Leah’s past. (In the first iteration, the two women had grown up together, and Sarah’s continued presence in Leah’s life was a meaningful revelation when her memories returned… but as I worked out the outline, I decided that having Leah come out of the suppression experience with no new friends, no meaningful connections, etc. would be both hard to believe and a disservice to her.) Winfrey has several possible etymologies, including “friend,” “peace,” and “joy,” all of which seemed fitting for Sarah—I think this also came up in Chapter 8 or 9, when Peter runs a background check on Sarah. Everyone was still feeling suspicious of her, so I was hoping to drop a subtle hint that she was a friend and not a foe. (Sarah was her name in the first draft as well, and her name was drawn from a high school friend.)
I’m going to jump in here with a reminder that this novel—except the first five chapters—will go behind a paywall at the end of April 2024. If you’d like to read it after that, or if you’d like to support me and my family, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.
If a monthly or annual subscription isn’t in your budget or interest, but you’d still like to show your support for my writing, you can leave a one-time “tip” in my tip jar over on Ko-Fi.
Extra Stories in the MIND Universe
If you joined Blinking Blue Line after the end of July, you may have missed my three entries for the inaugural
Competition over the summer.10 All three take place in the MIND world, and all three contain characters, events, and places you’ll recognize from Remembrance!
Part of the fun in serializing Remembrance was knowing that you all had these answers available to you—these stories are all public and free to read—but not very many people seemed to be aware of them, beyond
(obviously) and . It was my little secret to be holding onto them and watching you all hypothesize and learn alongside Leah. Now that the story is over, I’m thrilled to draw your attention to these pieces!My contribution to the Suff Lore (iykyk, if you don’t, you can click here) also takes places in the MIND universe!
I didn’t send this one to email, as it was something of an inside joke among fiction writers here on the platform; however, if you’re looking to find some new fiction to read, I’d highly recommend you check out some of the stories and authors included on the
timeline that put together (linked above).Indulge Me, If You Will
I designed a logo for the McNeill Institute while procrastinating the final chapters, and have considered finding somewhere that will make a cheap coffee mug or stickers or something—this is absolutely a vanity project, but I’ll throw y’all the bait and gauge interest in something like this.
I’ve been casually looking into options for print-on-demand or low-minimum bulk orders, and so far nothing has jumped out as a “have to have”… but I also know myself well enough to know that this will continue to be a source of procrastination for me throughout the rest of this process. (It feels so prideful to even ask this question, but I’m probably going to make something for myself on Shutterfly no matter what, so…?)
What’s Next for Remembrance?
I already have some high-level things I know I need to layer in during edits, and I’m excited to hear from you all as well as I lay out my plan of atatck.
Here’s what I’m already planning so far:
In the early chapters, integrate Leah’s memory palace into her internal monologue, her anxiety, her paranoia, etc. Ensure readers are familiar with the memory palace concept before The Library chapter.
If possible, leave more clues about how the memory suppression works, memories her mind has made up, etc. This might include more intentional “vanilla-ization” or active wondering about misremembered details.
Flesh out those side characters.
Try to really, truly resolve that Sarah is trustworthy by the midway point of the book.
Nuance Leah’s relationship with her mom more. Perhaps bring that up before the halfway point, when Leah is looking to confirm whether or not she actually had a stroke.
Elaborate more on her relationship with Jude. This might look like flashbacks or discussions with Sarah, Natalie, or Valerie. It might also include more conversations with her mother, who would have known Jude personally.
Elaborate more on her relationship with Pierucci—give them some face time at the beginning, show his bedside manner, set him up as this really good doctor who clearly cares a lot for her case. The goal here is to make the letdown even harder when he is revealed as a villain.
In terms of next steps, I’m planning to start by taking a little break. Maybe just a month or so, we’ll see. From there, I’m hoping to do a round of high-level outline edits before diving back into the nitty-gritty. I’m planning to hire
to get an amazing cover design before deciding what I want to do to publish it. James is still trying to convince me to find a traditional publisher—has anyone had a good experience with that? Most of what I read on Substack talks about the terrible side of traditional publishing, and I just don’t have that kinda energy. Plus, self-publishing is so easy these days… There are some really simple options, some really cost-effective options, and some really beautiful options when it comes to self-publishing. I’m trying to figure out where the sweet spot is for me when balancing ease, cost, and appearance.I’ve also considered trying to do an audiobook, but I think I’m getting way ahead of myself here and need to calm down. Because the book is told from a female POV, I would prefer to have a female narrator (or to do it myself), but the skill set required to do this well is so far beyond my knowledge that I would need to do a lot of research before diving in.
What’s Next for Blinking Blue Line?
Ideally, I’ll be writing short stories for the GWC ‘24 prompts and releasing those a few days after the official competition posts drop.
I think (think!) my next long-form project will be a 12-part, mixed-format serial called The Harvey Files, which I am hoping to run in September through November of this year. THF will tell the story of the Rehabilitation Research Program’s inception and implementation through the documents that Leah discovered, with light commentary from her when necessary. That being said, this is one I’d rather pre-write in its entirety, so that timeline may end up shifting a little bit depending on how quickly I’m able to get it written.
After that, I do have a few other serial stories on the horizon, including a couple independent stories that have been percolating in my brain for years, but which haven’t quite clicked until I’ve chosen to weave them into the wider MIND universe. These will likely be projects for 2025 and beyond.
In the meantime, I’ll be continuing to write one-off short stories: would love to write one about Dr. Pierucci and Leah’s relationship before the suppression, as Leah and Jude are dating. Also planning to draw on some of these Flash Fiction Friday prompts now that I have the time to write one-offs again.
I know this is already quite lengthy, so I’ll leave you with one last question. You may have noticed that this story is subtitled, A Rewriting. It would be inaccurate to say that I edited the first draft of this story; rather, as I’ve grown as a person and a writer, this story has grown with me, and the version you’ve read reflects that. However, I got a huge kick out of reading
’s First Novel (he shared it in his Weekly Muse column) and have wondered if any of you would be interested in reading the first draft of this story. It is, undoubtedly, not as well-written or well-crafted, but it’s certainly good for some laughs. There are a lot more aliens, and we’ll leave it there.If you’ve made it this far, frankly, I’m shocked and honored. Thank you for coming along for the ride as I rewrote Remembrance, and I genuinely hope that you enjoyed the story.
Ask me how I know what this is like. Definitely not experience, what?
I wish that I could share a time-lapse video with y’all of editing my outline document (I can’t, I’ve opened and closed it a bunch and edits don’t carry over…) just so you could see the process of how my brain worked when adding, removing, or combining chapters. Planting seeds. Deciding to follow up on things mentioned in passing earlier with no intention to follow through. Spending this much time on a story really allowed me the time to make sure that every Chekov’s gun was eventually fired, and while I know there will be room to add in more intense foreshadowing in post, I really enjoyed throwing out Easter Eggs and trying to prep you for what was coming later down the pipeline.
“Next best” in that this outline no longer contains James’ suggestion that we (“we”) mace Jude halfway through the novel when he starts chasing Leah to her car. RIP that scene that never got written.
Reasonable things, like researching the cost of an editor and making logos for the McNeill Institute on Canva.
Cue me referencing this James Veitch bit where he makes the scammer write a review of his imaginary novel.
The original draft of this novel (with aliens!) ended here, with the resolution of the plot arc (more aliens!) planned in a sequel that I never wrote.
Like creating McNeill Institute merch, you know, just for funsies.
Why did it take me this long to realize that MIND is an acronym for McNeill Institute for Neurological Development? :)
Incidentally, I would totally get MIND merch, just sayin'.
Thank you for sharing this. Lots of helpful details here.