I took a little break from the manuscript after my last post, since I had a fair bit of stuff on my plate. Thankfully, I didn't beat myself up over it like I would've only a couple of months ago, so returning to the novel felt refreshing this time, instead of daunting.
I was writing a pitch the other day for a residency of sorts, where this book would be my main focus. Naturally, I included a quick summary of what it was about. A part of that summary read, "... and tells the story of a young woman...", but for some reason, that felt... off to me, like it no longer fit.
Because it doesn't.
The more I've expanded what was originally the prelude, the more it's becomes clear that this is no longer predominantly the story of just one woman. This first part is already creeping up to 10,000 words and I suspect I'll have at least another five thousand more on top of that before I move onto the second. That's not a small sum by any stretch, yet I've still been thinking of this as just world-building—albeit, lengthy world-building—before we get to the meat of things.
This character has grown so much since I started the re-write. Her motivations have become clearer—not just in the manuscript, but to me too. Truth is, she stopped being a narrator for the set-up sometime just before my last post, when I wasn't happy with what I had written.
It wasn't the story itself that I was unhappy with though; it's that I was still writing it like a prelude, instead of a novel that was already rolling along.
I'll be sending the first 10,000 words to the person I'm working with on this novel, to get a sense of whether this was more aligned with what they had in mind. I'm a little nervous about that, but it's nerves mixed with just enough excitement.