My Writing Process (part three)- the Second Draft

I took a few days off after deciding to completely rewrite Moonbound to really think, then I got to work on draft number two. I reread everything I had on draft one, and color-coded highlights with different meanings, to know what parts to keep, rewrite, toss, and what information was still important to know. At the fresh start of this draft, I thought it was important to revise character names. I'm still not sure why, but I went through this phase where I thought that some of the simpler names of characters were unacceptable, and that since they were in a fantasy world, they needed more unique names, not just Opal or Juniper. That's when "Sage" because the Saye of today, and I added an extra letter to "Kade" to make myself feel more fancy.

Fun fact: Saye was called Sage for a very long time before I switched the G with a ton of random letters, thought the Y looked cool written in there, and then struggled figuring out how to pronounce that. Kaide was also called Kade at first, then in draft two was renamed Kaysun to be more "original..." That didn't stick for more than three chapters.

I was busy during my couple days rest, because when I started from scratch again, I had a whole new system, calling each of the Twelve one of the Heirs of the Moon Gods. This was problematic for many reasons- one of them being the "superiority" imbalance of having Tamsin as the 1st Heir and Kirk as the 10th Heir. Yes, there were also the 11th and 12th Heirs, but neither of them have been introduced yet, and those are some larger-scale spoilers.

Another vastly different part of Tysiea in this draft is the magic system. In this version of Moonbound, there were twelve moons instead of the five that we now have- and every person who was born as a Fashi to their specific moon had the same exact magic. Everyone born to the 1st Moon could control current, the second moon controlled change, and so on and so forth. With how things have turned out, this seems really weird to me- and I'm glad it's one of the aspects I developed more. Also, mau in this draft was called Manipulace- derived from the word manipulation- which I decided to toss in the end, but is still fun to think about! Meanwhile, in draft one, the Twelve's magics were referred to as Clinks.

Anyway, draft two only lasted for 54 pages before my interest, and the plot, suddenly fizzled out.

After that, I took an eight-month break from writing entirely. Nothing went on paper, everything just stayed jumbled up in my head, literally working itself out. The only times I would reflect on this story would be when I was too close to sleeping to remember thinking about it in the morning, continuing to evolve it subconsciously.

Things really started to click into place after that, and the next draft ended up being the final version of Moonbound. That might sound like the end of the journey- but really, it will take so. much. effort. to keep going along the road and trusting where it takes you.

I took that leap of faith, and now I'm going to share where it led me with you.