Alas, I think my giddy announcement of having finished My Fair Vampire was premature.  I got to an end but it wasn’t the right end.  My lovely beta reader confirmed this for me. I am not done.

To end the novel based on its current trajectory means I either need to use my writer’s time machine and rewrite earlier chapters OR I need to finish the story started and scrap the current ending.  You ever try to draw a really long horizontal line but your ruler is shorter than the width of your canvas?  You underscore a bit on the left and you repeat on the right, then go back and forth until, hopefully, the lines connect somewhere in the middle.  My lines missed each other because they were never on the same plane to begin with.  That’s the penalty for non sequential writing and writing without an outline.

Back at the drawing board, I’ve already pumped the word count up to 93k but still have tons of plot in my head.  Dear God, I never thought I’d be one of those writers with the 200k word bloated tick of a manuscript who wrings her hands when she’d done and says, “how will I ever cut it down to make it marketable?”.

My other issue is my genre.  My Fair Vampire was originally going to be a paranormal romance.  As I add more elements of intrigue and move farther and farther away from the de rigeur HEA (Happily Ever After) required in a romance novel, I find myself drifting into Urban Fantasy land.  Uh-oh, Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore….  Life is much grittier here, but I think it will be a hell of a ride.

So, I’m off to adjust my goals, mentally reset my timer and rename my novel (cause My Fair Vampire sounds waaaay too wussy for Urban Fantasy) for starters.  Maybe I’ll even do a new Teaser Friday next week….we’ll see.