My book Metl: The ANGEL Weapon is coming out this Tuesday,March 5th!
To celebrate, each stream leading up to the release will be about my process writing and/or publishing the book.
So let’s go over one of the most frustrating parts of the journey: rewriting the opening over and over.
During the last stream, we went over how the opening to my book Metl changed several times.
It took me six drafts to get from my first try at an opening to the one that appears in the final book. And that only counts complete rewrites; there were dozens and dozens of other drafts that had smaller changes in them too.
Why did it take so many drafts? And what did I learn from each one? Find out by watching the video below!
There’s way too much that we went over for a summary,
so watch the video here for my adventure in rewriting.
After that, we did a stipulation prompt. Chat came up with a bunch of stipulations, then voted on them, and we did the top four.
Here’s the four stipulations we had to write:
- Use as many tropes/cliches as possible (in every sentence)
- The story must contradict itself every other line
- Story has to feature a pet rock that can communicate through telepathy
- One of the characters has to be an obscure animal
For the obscure animal, we ended up going with the beautiful Gharial, which prompted me to have this reaction.
Here’s what we ended up writing: (coming up with all those contradictions was tough!)
No one will ever love me, I’m just a plain old pet rock with long blonde hair and big beautiful eyes, so big that they can see everyone who hates me so much.
Although there was one time when I was part of a love-triangle that threatened to destroy the world. It was me and my beautiful lover Gharial. The way his snout was like a scaly baseball bat, I could hear him breathing hard every time he stalked me as I ran late to school with a piece of toast dangling from my mouth. His baby-smooth skin made me want to rub my rough rock body all him. But there was no time for that, because a magical wizard appeared in front of us, making me drop my cereal in surprise.
DJ, the wizard communicated telepathically just to me, since I was a telepathic rock with no ears. He was very loud about it, so that everyone in the area could hear. You are the chosen stone. You must collect all five Cosmic Crystals to save the world. I am not a wizard.
I didn’t know what he meant, but at that moment I looked down at my spilled bowl of alphabet soup. It spelled out exactly what I needed to do:“gEt YoURsleF a mAtkeoVER gUuuuUUUUuUUUuUuUUuUuUurL.”
How could I, a humble, homely little rock that was the envy of everyone in school, possibly become beautiful through a makeover?
Thankfully I didn’t have to think for myself. Gharial waddled over, chomped on my chewy rocky body, and then digested me and pooped me out. When I erupted from his other end, I couldn’t believe it.
“Wow, DJ,” Gharial said. “You look… b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-beautiful.”
I stood there, having spent weeks on my makeover. It took forever to figure out what to do, but then as I was staring in my rock-mirror one night, I realized how to fulfill the makeover prophecy: I just needed to take off my glasses. Thankfully I never wore glasses in the first place.
With my newfound popularity and super powers that the wizard had given me, I quickly collected all eleven Demon Diamonds. When I brought them together, they exploded into dust, revealing their true power, and I was shocked by what I saw. It was the wizard.
“Bazinga!” the wizard cackled out loud since I have ears just like all rocks do.
Wizard! I telepathed back at him. I thought you were dead!
“Stupid little popular and beautiful rock,” the wizard seethed. “I faked my death, and you did exactly what I wanted. You brought all seven Otherwordly Orbs together, and in doing so, destroyed them! Taking away humanity’s only chance to defeat me.”
“Why?” I asked the wizard. “Why did you die?”
The wizard plucked at his moustache and twirled it with his finger. “Because I like being evil.”
He sneered at me, but all I could do was wink back at him with my human face.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Wizard, you forgot about two things.”
His corpse cocked an eyebrow at me. “Oh really?”
“Yeah! You forgot about the power… of love!”
My lover Gharial swooped out from the bushes and flew at the Wizard, crashing into him with his wrecking-ball of a snout, slicing him to shreds that sang “Happy Birthday” as they multiplied into hundreds of smaller Wizards that subsequently died very quickly
Together, all of them brought out a surprise birthday cake for me that I ate with Gharial. But before I even took my first bite, I had a flashback.
“gEt YoURsleF a mAtkeoVER gUuuuUUUUuUUUuUuUUuUuUurL.”
I remembered the prophecy of the oatmeal. There were three letters out of place: the “m” at the beginning of “makeover” and the random “t” in the word that I hadn’t noticed before.
The prophecy hadn’t been about me becoming ugly with a makeover, it was about me… doing a “takeover” of the world!
So I killed everyone, and none of us died sadly never before.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 6:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming March 2019.