This Is Why You Save Things

Now that Chaos Magic is in the hands of my editor, I'm starting to work on the next book in that series, Love Runes. When I first wrote Chaos Magic, I had a story in mind, but as I got to about the fifth chapter, I realized I had WAY to much story to fit into one book, so I decided it had to be three separate novels. I knew how the story began, and where it ended, but the in between stuff was a little hazy. It was like looking at a map of Los Angeles and saying I AM HERE and I WANT TO GO THERE, but which route to take? Many paths lead to the same place. Every time I thought about the second book ove r the past couple months, I wrote a chapter or two, but nothing that fit together in a longer story. After a lot of trial and error, I decided how to tell the second story. When I sat down to write it, I started fresh, but then realized that a lot of what I already wrote was usable. It needs to be rewritten so that flows together correctly, but it's nice to be a forth of the way through the rough draft already. Thank goodness I saved all those files! Unfortunately, now I'm coming up on the part where what I already wrote diverges a lot from the story I want to tell, so everything from here on is from scratch. But at least I have that head start.