Maybe the twelfth time is the charm?

Everyone has their little habits and idiosyncrasies.

I’m no different, especially when it comes to the creative process.

For years, actually, for over a decade now, I’ve used Scrivener to manage and compile all of my books–from brainstorming to outlining, to drafting, and even to the final output files.

Of course, if I needed to I could work in other formats or with other softwares. But it’s part of my process.

I love Scrivener…so much so that it’s really important to me to bring feedback from beta readers into it.

But one thing I seem to never remember how to do is get Microsoft Word and Scrivener to talk to each other.

That means I spent most of today figuring out how to combine Word documents, and then how to bring those comments into Scrivener. It took me at least twelve tries (I admit, I might have lost count), before I finally figured it out.

I was not at all expecting combining everything to take four hours and twelve tries to get it right. This is one of the less glamorous parts of the writing process, but still rather satisfying all the same…once it’s finally done!

What’s cool is now I can see comments all lined up and highlighted within the Scrivener documents themselves, and when I make my fixes, it’s just as easy as x’ing out the comment.

I love To Do lists and I love crossing things off my To Do lists, so this is a very satisfying process.

Over the last few weeks, I was making lists and letting my subconscious work on the different story problems, but now…

(with all these comments combined!)

…I can into the nitty-gritty of working with the text again.

One of those nitty-gritty story issues I’m resolving is the way I challenged myself to write a certain thing and ended up writing a completely different thing by accident.

It isn’t the first time that’s happened.

Here’s what I mean.

If you’ve read my After The World Ends series you know Dessa falls hard for a certain someone. But ORIGINALLY, I had planned to write a love triangle.

And dear reader, I did try, but my writer friends read an early draft of it and said so, so kindly… this is not that.

Anyway, there is no love triangle for my main character in After The World Ends and I think the series is better for it.

But in this new fantasy series, I thought it would be fun to try my hand at an enemies-to-lovers situation.

Dear reader, I did try, but again, my writer friends so, so kindly said… we LOVE this story very much, but… this is not that.

I am amused.

The story does what it wants. The characters are who they are.

Now it’s my job to embrace it.

Anyway, I THINK what I’ve actually got inside The Numinous is a forbidden love that develops between a ‘downtown girl’ from the empire’s poor hinterlands and an ‘uptown boy’ entangled in a politically important arranged marriage.

(I mean, there are a million layers to these books. The forbidden love relationship is one subplot among many, but it is an important one to get right).

By the way, have you followed the kickstarter for The Numinous book series yet?

When the time comes, I’ll be using the Kickstarter to talk more about that forbidden love, and all the other strange and wonderful ways this story has veered.