Studying the Work of Others, Hoping It Will Rub Off

I'm almost to the shitty rough draft stage with THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES. It's about 10,000 words too short, but I don't know which 10,000 they should be. Also, I don't know the answers to certain questions myself, and those questions need to be answered in the draft. Finally, it's the clay and not the sculpture -- most of it totally sucks.

I spent about two weeks going through a printed-out version from StoryMill and trying to write connecting tissue because I'd written everything else just scene-by-scene and put it into the software. The export from StoryMill didn't look like a book. It looked like a bunch of scenes. So I ended up writing A on the paper and then handwriting out several pages of A in a notebook and so on until I got to Q. Then I went back in and typed all the handwritten stuff into the scenes in StoryMill and did another export.

Then I stopped. And I despaired a bit, I'll admit, because it just wasn't where I want it to be before I show it to my beta readers (God bless them). 

So I am taking this week to reread two books that have a bit of starlight to them, starlight I want to infuse into the characters of Helen and Parker in TBoPC. Perhaps if I wallow in the sentences of work I admire I'll get some inspriration by osmosis. Previous to this I've been reading a lot of dystopian stuff just for fun, but that's a totally different style than what I'm trying to achieve with TBoPC.

And so far, my sad little novel. Oh, it sucks. This part of the process is pretty frustrating. At least I've learned enough now to know I'm not done yet.