YA Little Mermaid Retelling: Draft 1 Done!

Just finished!

It’s been a while since I blogged, but I had to get on and give an update because . . . I wrote another book! The first draft, anyway. This YA romance fantasy book has been in the back of my mind for a long time, and it’s finally on its way: a Little Mermaid retelling set in a Polynesia-inspired fantasy world. You can see the blurb for the novel on my Books page.

Why the Little Mermaid? I’m a sucker for a fairytale retelling, and as a kid, Disney’s Little Mermaid was one of my favorite fairytales. But when I got older, something bothered me. In a fit of teenage angst, Ariel makes an impulsive decision to become a human, and her father is the one who later pays the price for it. Then Eric saves the day while Ariel sits helpless at the bottom of a whirlpool. I know there’s more to it than that, but still. Ariel takes little to no responsibility for her actions, and yet, everything still works out for her. I wanted a retelling where Ariel’s actions had consequences. I also wanted her to save herself. On a separate note, I wanted a cheerful, bright story since most of the retellings I’ve read have a cold/dark/mysterious/eerie vibe to them. I wanted to write something that evoked Disney’s original Little Mermaid but added twists and nuance.

I wrote my first draft back in 2017. After spending a summer reading every Little Mermaid retelling I could get my hands on and doing all manner of mermaid-related research (did you know there are classes on being a mermaid?), I banged out a draft during NaNoRiMo (National Novel Writing Month—the month of November, during which writers push out books of at least 50K words).

But the problem was that with all the research I’d done, I hadn’t structured the story. I’d decided to do NaNoRiMo on a whim and just went for it. The resulting rough draft was so bad that I cringed and put it away for the next five years.

At the end of 2022, I finally got back to my Little Mermaid romantasy, and this time, I planned down to the details. I built worlds. I gave my main characters strengths and weaknesses designed to make them clash with each other. I plotted my storyline. And I gave myself an 8-week goal to get the first draft done.

I was a little off—it took 10 weeks. But it went so well! My preparation made this the easiest first draft I’ve ever written.

So what next? As I wrote, I made notes about areas that needed fixing, details that didn’t seem right, and subplots that needed to go somewhere or be cut. I’m going to spend around a month incorporating the biggest fixes and getting the major details consistent, and then the story will be off to my critique group, who will read it and provide feedback. At that point, I’ll continue to revise, working from the story level down to the scene and then page level, and finally, when the book is all polished up and pretty, I’ll query book agents to search for someone interested in representing it. My goal is to publish the story traditionally (as opposed to self-publish it). If all goes well, I hope to start querying in a year or less.

Thanks for following me on my writing journey! The path to publication is long and exhausting, but it’s punctuated with high points like finishing a fun first draft like this one. Check back here for updates about what’s happening with this young adult Little Mermaid retelling over the next year, and hold me to my goal of querying in early 2024!