Marie/Elise - September 2021 Writing Update

An old "cover" I made for fun for Marie/Elise!

 

Last month, I spent about two weeks working on completing the manuscript for my murder mystery and psychological suspense, Marie/Elise. It's a story about a young man - Adrian White - who moves into the affluent and gated town of Blackwood in hopes of a fresh start. Unfortunately, not one week after he arrives, socialite and Blackwood darling Elise Bellerose is found murdered - and Adrian is out of luck with a flimsy alibi and a past that works against him.

That's the general premise of the book! It's been a lot of fun to write, and the interesting thing is that in this one month I've gone through about three or four different drafts - each with something markedly different from the last. The first draft I worked with this month had Adrian's first-person POV and Person X as the killer. The second draft was still in Adrian's first-person POV, but this time it was Person Y that was the killer! The third draft was a dual-POV that went back and forth between Adrian and Marie - with Person X being the killer. And the fourth is the same thing, but with a little more editing and polish.

I'm not 100% finished with the book yet. The thing about me as a writer is that I can finish a manuscript, set it down for a while, and then still think up of a bunch of new things to add or change about the story! I can tell, even now, after all the hard work that I've done for Marie/Elise this year, that there's still more to be done. More to be added, more to be edited, more to be polished. I figure another month of hard work should really and truly align with the ever-evolving vision that I have in my mind. I won't feel satisfied until I feel satisfied with the manuscript - until I stop getting ideas and asking myself, "What if I do this instead?" or "What if I change that completely?"

And, of course, that takes a lot of time! A lot of fine-tuning! 

Still, the manuscript is complete, and that makes me happy. Not only has it been completed, it's been edited - and re-edited, and revised, and beta-read, and edited again and again and again. Even though I know there's more to be done, I'm still really proud with what it is right now because it's looking really polished and good to go!

The ironic thing about this manuscript is that during the month of September, as I mentioned before, I made some pretty significant changes to the plot and narration a couple of times. In the end, I went back to my original plot idea as I'd had it written out in my flashcards! The only thing that really changed was the dual-POV, which was essentially the addition of Marie's POV to the story. 

It's funny how you change some things up only to find that they were much better before! But if you don't try, you'll never know, right? I think writers - and artists in general - should be ready to tear things up, change them around, and see what happens, while always giving themselves a way to go back to the way things were before in case the new ideas don't pan out.

I ended the month with a good 66,671 words. It sounds short, and maybe it is, for a novel! But, as always, I'm already thinking of more content to add and more things to change, so this might not be the final word count for long. (And, I've entered this manuscript into a certain program, and if it gets accepted among the thousands of amazing manuscripts with extremely talented writers, it might change a lot, anyway!) 

We will see what the next couple of months have to offer for this story!

For now, I'm very content with where my plot is, and where my characters are, and most of what I'm thinking of in terms of edits and additions have more to do with character development - or, rather, conveying what a character is truly like to the reader. If you've read Apartment or Brittle Teeth, you probably know that getting into a character's twisted mind is one of my favourite things to do in a psychological thriller/suspense!