So…I finished my last novel, Scorched Earth, in late 2018 (it launched in 2019). After writing at a fairly rapid pace since my debut, The Genesis Code, came out, I decided to take a brief hiatus. I figured on 6 months, and it stretched to about a year. When I sat down to begin a new novel in late 2019, I decided to take a fresh approach, try some new things–while staying with my usual sci/tech/thriller sort of fare.

I decided to come at this one from the POV of the main character, in first person and present tense. For this novel, I wanted the character to be very front-and-center, and the science/tech more in the background. I found myself having to be scrupulous about not lapsing into past tense, but that wasn’t too hard.

I decided to “pants” this novel to see where that took me. Other authors do that with great results, maybe it would loosen things up for me. And, since this novel wasn’t going to be so intricately tied to a timeline that needed careful planning, it seemed a natural thing to try this time around. Normally, I’m a planner/outliner. Partly due to my nature, and partly due to the nature of my prior novels’ plots.

Then came the pandemic, working from home, a new foreclosure crisis to tackle at work, and everything else. Lots of distractions and that much more “picking up the draft and putting it down” along the way. Perfect storm. One of the benefits of outlining for me is to be able to pick up the draft and get right back into where I left off because with an outline I know where I need to go, I just need to write the story. For this one, I had no roadmap, I only had distractions. When I picked it up to work on it, I had no idea where I was going next, and momentum was very hard to find indeed. The only thing I knew was I did like what I had already written, and didn’t want to give up on it. But progress was beyond slow.

By the summer of 2023, progress had been frustratingly slow, and I finally decided the hell with pantsing, I’m going to take stock of what I had and get an outline going. And that made all the difference. Once I charted out where the character was going (both in her development and her physical travels), momentum returned and the rest of the drafting went far, far better. Not only that, but I realized Ravenna, too, is a planner. A lot about who she is and her motivations became so much clearer. I had been pantsing her character as well, which was also not working for me.

Recognizing that Ravenna was a planner and that she and I both needed and deserved a decent outline was the turning point. Her character, the way forward, the point of the book…all of it crystallized and I was able at last to get to the finish line of the first draft. This novel took significantly more time to write than The Genesis Code, when I was experiencing the entire process of writing a novel-length work for the very first time. Genesis took about two years start to finish. Ravenna took nearly five.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I write the outline and then slavishly follow it no matter what. I do depart if/when it appears justified, and I’ve redone outlines that weren’t working. But now I can say I’ve given pantsing a fair shot, and I can safely say I won’t be doing that again. At least not with a novel-length work.

And trust me, even though Ravenna had her plans all worked out, I made sure she hit plenty of snags along the way and had to pants it sometimes just to survive. Heheh.