Episode 68: How do you come back to a project?

On this week’s episode, JP and Crys talk all about returning to projects that they have set to the side, how they restart them, and what changes they tend to make.

Question of the week: What have you done to revitalize past projects? What does your process look like? Share your answer here!

Don’t miss our weekly check in on Patreon (it’s public!) where we talk about what we’re currently learning, any thoughts we missed in last week’s episode, and our plans for this week!

Show Notes

www.cryscain.com 

Your Book, Your Brand by Dana Kaye

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Transcript

JP: Hello friends. This is episode number 68 of the Write Away Podcast. And it is…

Crys: Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021.

JP: As we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…

Crys: Crys Cain.

JP: Hi Crys. How are you?

Crys: I would say neither of us is doing well.

I think it’s not even really flashback from the major amounts of socialization we did in October. It is more just another crazy thing. And at some point I might stop expecting my life to reach some semblance of normal and just accept that it’s pure chaos and that I am a chaos gremlin. Which I am, I am a chaos gremlin. We know that, but I keep expecting a semblance of normal, and new chaos waves keep coming. Even ones that I know are coming up and I’m like, it’ll be fine, it’s gonna be fine. But we’re flying back to Costa Rica tomorrow. And we don’t have a house yet. We have an Airbnb until Monday, so that’s exciting.

JP: That’s madness.

Crys: Cue crazy face. But yeah, we’re renting an Airbnb. We had hopes to visit a specific house on Friday, stuff happened and it’s not available. So now we’re having to readjust and look at a bunch of houses and worse comes to worse, we just rent an Airbnb for longer than we want. Because it’s more expensive that way, but it’s still doable. And that allows us to have our feet under us and figure out schooling, which we feel like we’ve got a good grasp on right now. We’ve been talking to a few schools. They’re all doing their registration for school to start in February.

I even found like a, what do they call it? A Christmas camp. So like their big break. What would be summer break for the Northern hemisphere is from the end of November to the beginning of February. And so they have Christmas camp instead of summer camp. So we found the school option that Smalls might be able to go to.

Of course, the day before I fly out the US actually approves the vaccine for children, like maybe starting today, depending on if your place that you go to get vaccines has it. But Costa Rica has already announced that they’ve bought vaccines for children for distribution next year. So it shouldn’t be too long before I can get Smalls de-plaguified.

JP: That’s great news. Also, what happened today where you were?

Crys: I’m dreaming of a white exit. It snowed. And the kiddo has been asking me to build a snowman for two fucking years. And so we did, we built a snowman this morning. And as soon as it was built, he was like, I’m gonna pelt it with snowballs. And I was like, wait, let everybody see your snowman first. And as soon as the last person saw his snowman, he was like, ATTACK!. And he just completely demolished it.

JP: I love it. It was like a decent size snow.

Crys: Yeah, it was definitely like about an inch that stuck. It’s all melting now, but yeah, first snow of the year.

JP: Very fun. I love it.

Crys: And you, sir? You are forced into vampiric hours.

JP: I am. The day job has any working until like midnight to one or two, which is really fun, in Arkansas.

And of course, in the middle of it, I had to leave on Thursday which Arkansas apparently has no direct flights anywhere you want to go. Fun fact. I think it’s just some weird nexus. But yeah, so I had to make a connecting flight and get back home. Thursday, I had to drive four hours to Southern Illinois to attend a visitation of my late uncle. Then the following day, the funeral, and then drive four hours to Iowa to attend a wedding the following day, to then drive home and then fly back to Arkansas. So every day was like just busy. It was a thing. It’s done.

Crys: Yeah, thankfully there weren’t two more funerals in there. Because that’s a movie, isn’t it?

Three funerals and a wedding?

JP: Is it three weddings and a funeral? Or is it three funerals?

Crys: I don’t know. You could do the parody, you could do the parody. Whichever way it was, do the other way, but not in real life.

JP: Yes. That joke was made. Also someone said, all you need is someone to have a baby and you would have gone through all life moments. Someone was very pregnant and I was like, eyeing them the whole time. Like, when is it going to happen? It’s going to happen, isn’t? It didn’t. But I was, at that point, I was prepared. We were good.

Crys: Like, I’ve got the car ready.

JP: At this point, I did. On the plus side, through all of this madness, I have been maintaining like a checklist, except for the past couple of days because I’ve lost my mind. But I’ve maintained a checklist and I’ve been able to like, get things done. Which is very nice because that’s like my little stability in my pocket of chaos. So that has been nice.

Crys: I have been getting things done, but it has not been stable. I still haven’t written. But I’ve kept up to date on Podcast stuff. I finally, as anyone who follows our Patreon will know, in the weekly message that we send out normally on Saturdays but I think I sent out at 10 o’clock on Monday night, that I finally got my website done. cryscain.Com and listed my editing services and all that good stuff.

JP, I think you got done like a week before me. Or even like you were almost done with it at the editor’s conference, like you were working on it while we were there. Because he had strange brain space to do such things. And everybody’s been really excited and posting their stuff and getting feedback. I was like, all right, I just got to do it. So I did it. It’s done. Stage one is done. Now we have to tweak because that’s what we do.

JP: Yeah, same. The only reason I had like brain space to do it is because in my mind it was like, why reinvent what already existed? And I really like J’s set up because it was just super clean, straight to the point. So I literally was just like, hey, I want to copy your stuff. And he’s like, here’s how I did it. And I was like, perfect.

Crys: Yep. And note to anyone out there, he had permission. Don’t just go plagiarizing. He had permission.

JP: Yes. Yes. I explicitly was like, I would like to use the same plugins as you, is that okay? And it was, yes.

Crys: Okay. As I am, hopefully getting back to stability and getting back to writing, and I asked you this morning, do you often have projects that you have to set to the side and then come back to them later? And his words were, that’s 90% of my projects.

I was like, excellent. So let’s talk about coming back to a project that you haven’t touched in a while. How do you reload it? How do you get restarted for it? Or do you just set it aside and say, you know what, that energy is gone.

JP: I like coming back to projects. I actually was looking at one the other day. Because I like to take notes and because I’ve been using this book since before I mentioned using this book, I have world-building notes really early on in here that I’ve been looking through and I’m like, oh, I could come back to this project. And that’s really the fodder, the starting point that I make as I look back at what was either previously written or world built or mentioned, just to get back in that head space.

That’s how I start. How do you start?

Crys: I also review just everything that I have on the project. For one of the projects that I have, is really simple and I won’t have too much trouble pulling it up and going with it. It’s non-fiction and so it’s in bits and pieces that are really easy to just do a piece and then be done with it.

There’s a big list and I just have to go through and do them. So that’ll be pretty easy to load up. The harder thing to load up is the fantasy serial that I have been talking about since what, I don’t know, June now, or may, maybe earlier. And I have a lot of world building notes as well.

My dumb ass put them in two separate notebooks. And so I have definitely had fun times scrambling to figure out where this information was and some information that was randomly only in Plottr. So my first step, when I get back to that project, is I will be condensing them all. I don’t know if I’ll be typing them all into a document or if I will be handwriting them into a digital notebook, but I will have them all digitally somewhere and make sure I pull all of those pieces together.

I also have like a first scene that was written. I didn’t get any farther than that. And I’ve had so many thoughts about what needs to go into that scene. So I will rewrite that scene. I don’t know if I’ll go in and change what’s there or rewrite it from scratch. But I know that those will be my first two steps.

One of the problems I’ve had in the past when coming back to projects is that in the time between starting the project, which might’ve gotten pretty far along, I can think of a cozy mystery that I think I have 16,000 words on, maybe more. And when I come back to it, where I am at my understanding of story craft is far beyond where I was then.

How have you handled those particular projects?

JP: So I have like a really fun, epic fantasy that I’ve been playing with. And I have a 10,000 word short story that I haven’t done anything with, as well as I don’t know, like 90,000 words on it. And I know that when I go back to that, all of that is not going to stay.

The truth of the matter is I have come at it with a different viewpoint. And what I have written is no longer reflective of how I view a story. So I already know that all that’s going to go. Which is sad, but at the same time, it’s reusable content. There’s always a nugget of structure in there.

That’s what I view it as. It may have been fleshed out at the moment, but it’s a skeleton now. I don’t know where I was going with this. It started to get weird and sad in my head. So it’s now a skeleton for me to flush back out.

Crys: Yeah, I think specifically of the cozy mystery, I think that I, when did I start that one? I’m not really sure it was 2019, 2020, I think. And I was attempting to do it at the same time I was writing romance and I just have a hard time carrying on two really intense projects at the same time. I just can’t do it. But what I know that I’ll keep is most of the world building. I know that I’ll expand on the world building.

Because I was figuring it’s urban paranormal cozy mystery. So it has an urban fantasy-esque in that it exists in the real world. So a lot of that kind of exists already. It’s based on a real place, but I renamed it. And I will keep the majority of the characters as they are but most of the plot will be completely different.

Like what the mystery is, what brings her to this particular location? That’s all going to change. There’s one thing that will not change. And that’s the fact that she has a cat, Familiar, who doesn’t like her and is super sassy and did not want to be bonded to her, but they’re stuck together. Like there’s pieces that I’m like, those are the gold gems. Like those, I absolutely have to keep, they make me laugh. Even when I go back and read this story, there are so many things where I’ve made, whatever it makes me now laugh. And I’m like, okay, it has good heart, but the bones are brittle.

JP: Yeah. That’s funny. And I think for the epic fantasy that I want to revitalize, like the past six months or so I’ve refined what my quote unquote brand is, which basically it floats around dark, strange and queer. So I’m looking back at this epic fantasy and it doesn’t really have those elements strongly in it. So that’s already one thing that I’m looking at and I’m like, okay how can I fix this?

So like my main character ,cause at the time I was writing a lot of female characters in straight relationships because that’s conveniently how you can short code things. And I was like, nope, I’m switching that to a male. And I’ll have different characters at different various diversity in it.

And really that’s how I’m looking at it right now is, how does this reflect in my brand and how can I revitalize it to better fit that? And half of it is really easy things to switch at this point and really strengthen the overall thing I want to say.

Crys: Yeah. I think there’s definitely elements of that. Thankfully I’ve been publishing for a bit longer and been able to work out like, specifically with the romance, when it has been just really not easy for me to write, to figure out what are the things that I really enjoy writing about and how do I inject them into the things I have to finish up so that it’s not as painful for me.

And I’ve noticed that when I’ve strayed from including the things that I really care about, one of them is neurodivergent characters, then the writing is so much more of a slog for me.

JP: The epic fantasy I did I did during nano and you just, you have to write every day. And I know that I dictated half of this. I wasn’t in a place to really grasp story structure. And so it just kept going. It was just a stream of thought. So I know going back to it, like the structure is a little wonky.

Crys: Yeah. It sounds like we have very similar approaches. One, reread everything. Have you ever read anything where you read it and you were like, you know what, like none of this interests me anymore? Or is there still always just something that you want to keep?

JP: I would say none of it interests me at this point. I wouldn’t say any more. It’s more if I am looking back on something to maybe revitalize it, I’m looking for something specific because in my head, I’m like, oh yeah, I remember a couple of months ago I wrote an epic fantasy about the eight elements, that sounded cool. And then I’ll go back and I’ll look for that specific thing. So I might open up a couple because of course, I don’t know about you, but of course I name things that make no sense to future JP for no reason. Or I have five different Scrivners with the same name, which again, thank you past JP.

Crys: Sci-fi project 1 – 20. Urban fantasy, and then I’ll put a date though, because I can often remember vaguely, like when in my life I was writing something or when I started something. And so I often will put a date in something.

JP: I like your mind. My mind, I’ll just give a name. Like Finn, okay, has no help for me. Then I later look it up and I’m like, oh, this was a scifi. That was weird.

Crys: I will either name it after the main character or the genre and it’ll sit like that until I have something.

JP: Just for reference, everyone else, don’t do that. Put a genre in there just in case you put it away. The future you will be graciously appreciative. But yeah, so I’m looking for that specific story that I have in my head. And then yeah, I’m using that. So I wouldn’t say that I look at something I’m like, man, I don’t want this or I’ll never use it again. I’m usually looking back in the past for something specific. Yeah.

Crys: I think that there are probably plenty of projects that I’ve forgotten about that just sit somewhere digitally for the most part. And if I discover them, I might steal bits and pieces and pull them into other projects, but it probably wouldn’t start that project up straight up.

The ones that are like in my head currently are the ones that are closer to what my skill level is now, my overall author brand intentions. And they’re the ones that I’m like, I really want to get back to this, but I have to load it up.

JP: Oh yeah. There are very few that I’m like, I will definitely come back to this one. I would say there’s like a max of three that the world I built was really fun and engaging. It just wasn’t the right time or, something along those lines. But for the most part, yeah, I don’t really go back to a lot of it. It’s words that helped me along the journey and they can stay in the past.

Crys: Oh, what question are we going to ask our listeners today, JP?

JP: What have you done to revitalize past projects? What does your process look like and all that jazz? I’m curious what people have revitalized.

Crys: Yeah, I’m really curious, like what projects have people like necromancied to full life.

JP: Also, share a book link. If you revitalized something that was like 10 years old and then you’re like, I’m going to bring you back to life and then you published it, share it.

Crys: Excellent. All right, friends. We will be discussing Dana Kaye’s, Your Book, Your Brand next week.

By the time you hear this, we’ll already have recorded that episode. And if you would like to help us choose our December book, you can check us out on Patreon. The link will be in the show notes.

JP: All right. See you later.