After NANO-ing my first book, I started working on a second. Cool concept leaning into a good premise and some good structural tentpoles for the first quarter. Got some supportive feedback from a pro. Then I took some time to work on my short game. I took a couple of classes and wrote some stories before coming back to Book Number Two.

When I finally came back to it, I found myself stalling when trying to put together an outline. I didn’t know the characters and my plot beyond the first quarter was disjointed crap. So I burned it down, keeping the premise, early plot points and four characters. Everything else went to the great recycle bin in the sky (with an archive copy on Dropbox, just in case).

I started again and in a day have surpassed the progress that I threw away.