Cabin Girl Update

If you’ve been following us on social media, you know we’ve been working on The Cabin Girl for a long time. We started work in December 2016 and finished the first draft in February 2018. Since then, we’ve been editing and re-writing. And re-writing and re-writing. So why isn’t it finished yet? Well, we’ve run into problems.

We’ve been writing together for almost seventeen years, but Cabin is the first book we’ve put together. It was a huge learning experience. We thought it would be very easy, because we’re experienced writers and because we’re avid readers. We were wrong, heh.

That’s not to say Cabin is a bad book. No, no, we’re very happy with the story! It’s just so, ugh, wordy. We made our draft way too long. Romances typically have a word count anywhere between 30k and 60k. The Cabin Girl clocks in at 101k.

Part of the problem is our style of writing. What works for roleplay does not work for book format. But the greater problem is that we’ve made the story too big. We thought that we could shave off a lot of that excess word count through editing. Cutting out all the repetitive phrases and whatnot. Except we keep wanting to add more chapters to make the story flow better.

When we wrote the first draft, we wrote the chapters out of order. We had our detailed outline and each of us had our chapters we were assigned to write. Chapter 17 may have been written before chapters 15 and 16, for example. We both wrote at our own pace. But as you can imagine, this caused all sorts of tone and flow issues.

We learned not to do that with our newer book, Redemption. We wrote those chapters in order and it made the first draft and the editing immensely easier. But the Cabin draft was kind of a nightmare. We’ve had to go through and completely rewrite many of the chapters. We’ve had to correct inconsistencies in the character’s moods and the overall writing tones. We also decided in the second draft to alter one of the main character’s personalities, which gave us a lot of extra work.

We do plan on hiring a professional editor to have a look at Cabin after we’re finished with our own editing. But it’s not ready for that yet. We want to get it as polished as we can before giving it to someone else. And we are polishing. After many, many discussions and many trial and error re-writes, we’re about halfway through the second draft.

We could keep trucking through it, but we’ve hit a wall because we have an important decision to make. The story is so big that it could actually be two books. There’s even a nice dividing event in the middle of the book. The first half and the second half have their own arcs. It could work splitting it. We only hesitate because the beginning half doesn’t have a lot of romance.

If you’ve read this far, I’m sure you’re familiar with the book and the story, but it’s about a woman who disguises herself as a cabin boy on a pirate ship. So even though she develops feelings for the captain, the feelings aren’t returned until after he learns who she really is. The earlier chapters in the story are more about her adventure and the danger she faces with her secret. The later part of the book is heavier with the romantic themes. We’re not sure if we could split the book into two and push them both as romance novels.

Yet as it is, it’s really too long to be sold as a single romance novel. Another option we have is simply pushing it as an adventure novel. It is, honestly. We call it an adventure romance for a reason. It does have romance, but it is heavy on the adventure. There’s danger and excitement and even fantasy elements.

So, we’re not sure what route we’re going to pursue. If we did decide to split the book, we could probably finish up the first one pretty quick because we’ve already completed half of the second draft. We would need to go and tweak certain things, to make it really work as a solo book, but it would be doable. We just don’t want to split it simply to get it out. We want to decide what’s best for this story.

For now, we’ve put The Cabin Girl on hold. We love this story and we’re definitely not abandoning it. We will come back to it, I can guarantee you that. But we’re going to think more about what we want to do with it, and in the meantime, work on some other books. As I hope you’ve heard, we have Redemption coming out soon. We started working on that one and the fresh story lit a fire within us. It’s motivated us anew and we’re very excited to get our first book published!

So we’re going to focus on completing Redemption, working on a Valentine’s Day story we have in mind, and probably some other ideas we have bouncing around that could be turned into quick stories. We learned with Cabin and with Redemption how to keep a romance story short the way it should be. Redemption is only 40k, and with the other lessons we’ve learned from Cabin, it was done in a much better and easier way.

We will definitely keep you updated on what we decide for The Cabin Girl. We want this story to be shared. We just want it to be shared in its best way.

-A