Starting a Sequel Four Years Later

[psychotick]

Hi,

Well the title fairly much says it all. All I can say is that having finished Maverick four years ago and having never wanted to see it again, I started a sequel to it about a month or so ago. No idea why.

Now I'm about 60k in and pulling my hair out endlessly. Baldness is not far away! The problem is that I haven't even looked at the book in four years. Worse the companion file - ie all the bits and pieces about the book like names and places details, has gone walkabout. Which means I'm living a continuity nightmare.

Normally I could write three or four k a day. But on this I literally have to stop every few pages and go back to the original book to fact check. Things like distances and hair colour etc. It's driving me crazy.

Has anyone else been through this?

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Boneman]

I had a gap of three years between one book and its sequel, and I found that so many of my original ideas for the second book went out of the window when I re-read Book 1. The very long distancing between the books allowed so much (unconscious) fermentation of ideas that book 2 often took different courses to what I'd intended. But I'm not a rigid planner, it has to be said, just an outline kind of person, so that may be why it didn't seem so much of a problem. Possibly if you re-read book 1 again a couple of times you'll want to work on that, as well!

 

[tinkerdan]

I've not yet had that large a gap but I have--since publication--read the books over looking for and highlighting problems that I see now that I never noticed before and have been able to keep up on continuity that way. My suggestion--if you have kindle or even a hard copy you might want to go back through and do some highlighting. Of course I knew it was writing a trilogy-at the very least- and I knew I had threads that were left dangling so I needed to try to tie those up before the final part of the story concluded.

 

[scientia]

Normally I could write three or four k a day. But on this I literally have to stop every few pages and go back to the original book to fact check. Things like distances and hair colour etc. It's driving me crazy.

Why don't you create a case board like detectives do?

 

[Brian G Turner]

Has anyone else been through this?

I think - knowing what I know now - it's better to let old projects die, and just start new ones afresh.

Every year sees you become a better writer - every year sees older manuscripts become more of a problem to work with.

I found - with my own writing - that I had to rewrite everything regardless. And made a lot of major changes in each rewrite.

And yet - even now - it remains frustrating because I know I am capable of writing smoothly - but an older WIP contains so many bumps that are hard to smooth down. So even late draft can look lumpy in places.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I'm regretfully coming to that conclusion on my 1993 Jorath's Quest. Perhaps just write from scratch from a new summary of it. I think in the last six months of writing after the 20 year gap I'm starting to improve a little (Four drafts done). I did 7 revisions of 1st, 4 revisions of 2nd but 3r d & 4th I only did basic proof/spelling correction. I'm going to write two more drafts over next 2 to 3 months and then revise all six. They are all set in same "Storyverse" anyway.

But on this I literally have to stop every few pages and go back to the original book to fact check. Things like distances and hair colour etc. It's driving me crazy

I have two solutions:
1) I use Notepad++ which has tabs for each doc and I have a doc on each aspect, Cast list, events, places, government, technology, food & Drink.
2) I installed a copy of Mediawiki, same free SW that Wikipedia uses. I have one locally and a copy on my hosting on a password protected subdomain in a separate password protected directory on my hosting. Most of the content is from the separate text documents.