Hm this may or may not be a good time to talk about this but here I go
TLDR: between working on LiaHT and then completely rewriting The SOLE Project again, the actual sensitivity reading round is a long time away.
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I realized I never said anything about this, so let’s go through it step by step for clarity’s sake
As I stated above, I’m going to have to rewrite The SOLE Project to be more inclusive and sensitive BEFORE I hand it to sensitivity readers.
“Duh,” you say. “Is this news?”
Let me explain what I mean.
There were two major categories of problems that came out of my beta reading round in March 2018: plotting issues and sensitivity issues.
At that point, I was mentally and emotionally prepared to handle one of those categories. Three guesses as to which one.
So because I was overwhelmed by suddenly having to consider sensitivity issues, I instinctually decided to start rewriting SOLE with the goal to resolve plotting problems first.
(I do think that even if I hadn’t been overwhelmed, I still would have done it this way. Sensitivity issues have to be worked through delicately, and that would be difficult to do if I didn’t have my plot nailed down like I do now. But this is an explanation of what actually happened, so I can’t pretend it was a purely logical decision. I was freaking out)
ANYWAY
It would make no sense to hand the current draft off to sensitivity readers. That rewrite only fixed plotting and pacing problems, because I was in denial about the major sensitivity issues in my work and was figuring out how to approach them.
I’m still not sure I’ve figured it out completely, but at least I’ve stopped trying to run away from everything.
Now that I have the plotting pretty well figured out, the next SOLE step is to take a whole draft and dedicate it to resolving those sensitivity issues as best I can on my own.
I have no doubt that I’ll fuck it up somehow.
I’ve been gathering resources and lists and posts with relevant advice for me to reference during the upcoming draft, but I still don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to get the majority of things right.
Obviously, that’s what the sensitivity readers are for.
Unfortunately, it’s going to take a long time to get to the point where I start searching for those readers.
Even if I wasn’t in the middle of writing the first draft of my newest wip idea, even if I started rewriting SOLE today, the latest draft is 120k words long.
Rewriting all of that, while adding new scenes and changing things, is going to be a long process. Months and months. Maybe more than a year. Who knows?
The point is, I don’t think I was clear about how much of a long term process this whole sensitivity thing was going to be. I hadn’t really processed it for myself, tbh. But now that I have, I think it’s important to note that we’re in for a long haul here.
Thanks for sticking with me through it.