Director's Cut: Chapter Six

My sister asked "And then what?" and I didn't have an answer.

📹 This is the Director’s Cut for Chapter 6 of MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: the Holy Crone's chapter, my sister's question, and the plan I'm pretending I had all along. You can watch the video or read the written version below.

🌊 Chapter 6 went out last Saturday. Read it (or listen to the audio version 🔊) now if you haven’t yet!

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Welcome to the Director’s Cut for Chapter 6!

I’m traveling and I forgot my phone holder, so I recorded this propped up against a wall, crouched to fit in frame, hoping I don’t get back pains later.

Which makes it the perfect theme for this one, both for the chapter and for the grand plan: how much I’m winging it. Sometimes these things can look so polished, so perfect. I don’t know if you feel that way about me, but I’m going to pull back the curtain and tell you what’s really going on here.

Get weird with it

Chapter 6 is one of those other POV chapters. This is one of the things my agent suggested when she said, “Get weird with it.” And then when I did it, she was like, “That’s too weird.”

I have more chapters like this throughout the book from other POVs. I never really expected this to be a multi-POV book, and it’s not in the traditional sense, but you’re going to see a few other characters appear.

It’s funny how, even having written this whole book, I’m still changing and finding and tweaking. Last week, I decided to split Chapter 5 into two. This week, I was going to release Chapter 6 with Chapter 7, and then I decided not to.

And I realized there’s no one stopping me. I can just decide.

Even with something that’s so planned out, I just go with my gut sometimes. That’s how these POV chapters came to me. I wrote them in this stupor, from a distance, and they’ve always stuck that way. I didn’t really revise them much.

So I want to take that chaos and winging it I’m doing with the chapters and step back and talk to you about the grand plan.

Go all-in, or go back into the cave

As you might recall, I had finally geared up and gotten into the mindset that I was going to self-publish this book. I had booked a book cover designer. I had booked an underwater photo shoot. I had picked my birthday as my release date.

from my underwater photoshoot with Caroline White Photography

And then I had an author friend read the book. He said he loved it, one of his favorite books, but he wanted more. He wanted me to slow it down.

So I hit this checkpoint. Do I go ahead with my release full steam ahead, or do I stop and fully revise this book and flesh it out? To me it was a binary: go ahead, or fully stop, go back into your revising cave, and close the door.

I didn’t have my revising mojo, and I didn’t want to lose my momentum if I stopped. That’s when I came up with the Substack idea: release the 10 chapters of Act One, which is now 11 chapters. Chaos.

And I felt so good about this plan.

“And then what?”

I was sitting with one of my sisters the other day, and she asked, “Hey, so what’s your plan with all of this?”

I told her. “I’m going to do my 10 chapters, and then I’m going to stop and see what I want to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, whether I want to release it as is, or expand it out.” My two binary choices.

“Caroline, that’s not a plan.”

“Yeah, that is my plan.”

“That can’t be your plan. People are excited. You have momentum. You are building people up. They’re going to read all these chapters, hit a cliffhanger, and then you’re going to say goodbye and go write in your writing cave?”

“Mm, yep, that’s the plan.”

“No, that is not your plan. Fix it.”

So all the people who don’t read the Director’s Cuts are going to think I have a really cool plan, that I’ve always had a really cool plan. But y’all, I’m going to tell you the truth. That was the plan. But now I have an even cooler really cool plan.

You ready to hear it?

Upgrade to In the Cave to keep reading:

• The new plan (and why it now feels so obvious it’s silly).. but still really cool!

• The lesson my own main character could’ve taught me

• Why I feel like a chicken with its head cut off (with paint on its feathers)

• The one word from my agent that told me we weren’t the right fit

Plus the full video.