My Little Mermaid Retelling and My No-good, Very Bad Summer

Revision update! Draft 3 of my Little Mermaid retelling is complete!

Finally.

If you glance through the blog titles on my website, you’ll notice I skipped from draft 1 to draft 3. That’s because I blitzed draft 2 to get the story ready for the Hot Mess Writers Club, and then I needed a writing break while they read it. On a Friday night in early June, my writing group gave me great feedback. I was really excited to dive into the third revision, but then Saturday happened.

If we’ve talked in the last few months, you know it’s been a challenging summer. To keep it brief, here’s what happened:

1. My youngest brother died.

2. Bobby and I got a puppy.

3. Our A/C broke.

All three things happened the same day. You'd think the puppy would have been a bright spot, but it turns out baby animals have time-intensive care and training needs. Then naturally, when big things happen, small things add up, and that was the case here, too—multiple close friends moved away, the hot, humid, and mosquito-ridden Georgia summer started, and other straws piled onto the camel’s already broken back.

Needless to say, it’s been rough, so thank you for all the kindness, support, and patience I’ve received these last few months and into the present.

There’s a lot to unpack about what happened this summer, but since most of it is personal and this blog is to celebrate the draft 3 milestone, I’ll keep this focused on how the events affected my writing. After everything happened, I underwent 4–6 weeks of feeling depressed basically all the time. Since my default life mode is “highly productive,” it probably looked like I was still functioning well, but to me, it was like dragging myself through mud every day. At times, I felt like all I could do was push myself harder, hoping that if I just got X thing checked off my to-do list, I would feel better (obviously, that’s not how it works, and you can know that, but boy, it can be hard to feel it).

In the meantime, the story I had been so eager to revise was languishing on my laptop. I had no mental or emotional space to work on it, and even though I understood why, as the summer wore on and I felt the same, I got more and more frustrated. The Hot Mess Writers were a great support system to remind me that I could change my writing goals and timeline and it was okay not to be okay yet.

Eventually, I felt like I had enough of a grip on life to start sifting through my feedback and creating a revision plan. It was hard. I was more sensitive to critique comments than I normally am, and while I’d initially felt like needed revisions would be relatively minor, the deeper I dug, the more issues with backstory and world-building I uncovered. How was I supposed to fix my characters’ world when I couldn’t fix my own? I finally nailed down a revision plan, but as I worked through the actual rewrite, I struggled with periodic anxiety over whether I was ruining my story or making it better. I kept waiting to cross the threshold where the changes coalesced and generated excitement to fuel a mad rush to the finish, and . . . that didn’t happen until the second-to-last chapter. It felt anticlimactic, like walking a marathon you’d planned to run and then sprinting the last ten feet.

But despite the stress and difficulty this draft took me through, now that I’m done, I’m getting my excitement back, and I can share some of the revisions that made this iteration of my story the best thing I’ve ever written:

1. Distilling and strengthening one of the main themes of the book: learning how to be a good leader.

2. Bringing back a character I had initially killed off, leading to a touching scene at the end of the book.

3. Giving one of my villains stronger Azula vibes (Avatar: The Last Airbender).

4. The epilogue. I didn’t change much about it, but . . . I still love it.

Whether this is the first of my scattered blog posts you’ve read or if you’ve checked in regularly over the years, thank you for letting me share a little piece of my story with you. If you’d like to see more about my Little Mermaid retelling, Knife and Shell, hop over to my Books page and read the blurb. If you enjoyed this blog, click below to join my monthly newsletter to get fun emails about writing, books, and other magical things straight to your inbox.

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