Cloud Bear: Draft 0.5

Normally, when I write a book, I first write a detailed outline supplemented with a document full of notes on worldbuilding, snippets of scenes I’ve already written, and foreshadowing reminders. I plan on going more in-depth into my outlining process at a later date, mainly because I’m always fascinated to see how other authors outline or don’t outline, and everyone’s process is a little different.

Back to the matter at hand, however. How can I have half a draft of Cloud Bear? That’s simple. The first time I set out to write Cloud Bear, all the way back in the fall of 2019, I did so without an outline for basically the first time ever. I also didn’t have notes. Actually, I had only come up with the idea for Cloud Bear a scant two months earlier.

Now, this wouldn’t have been as big of a deal only a few years later. In 2023, I started three novels without written outlines and wrote the outlines later at about the halfway point, but that was possible for me because I’ve grown as a writer since 2019. In fact, it was this process—the process of writing Draft 0.5—that facilitated much of that growth.

So, I started writing Cloud Bear without an outline. However, the bigger issue was the half-formed ideas of the world, magic, plot, and characters. This is where I needed to grow as a writer, and what outlines and detailed notes generally help me see and fix. Every morning, I considered what ought to go in the chapter I was writing for that day, and then I’d write about half the chapter before getting stumped. I generally wrote half a chapter a day, which for me is absolutely pathetic.

Finally, I managed to eke out twenty-nine chapters. In that final chapter, I realized something. The story would be infinitely better if I had Cyrus and Alec do something completely different from the path I’d led them down. However, that wasn’t an edit. Changing their actions would require throwing out nearly all of the twenty-nine chapters I’d spent months working on. I thought about it and thought about it, and finally decided the obvious—no sacrifice was too great to make the story better.

I threw out those chapters, which I named Draft 0.5, gave the story another nine months to circulate through my mind, and, a year after I first started Draft 0.5, I had an outline, notes, and was ready to start what would become Draft 1.

Why do I bring this up?

There are a lot of really funny differences between 0.5 and 1. Differences I’d like to discuss in connection to other Cloud Bear topics, so I want you to know what I mean when I say, “In Draft 0.5…” I’m confident it will be amusing to us all.

Let me give you an example. In 0.5, the big event I altered was what Cyrus and Alec did after leaving Dr. Tanner’s house. Oh, by the way, Dr. Tanner’s place wasn’t a cozy, private cabin in 0.5. It was a full-blown clinic with a couple nurses and another doctor, in a manor house in the mountains. 2019 Merlynn evidently didn’t consider how obnoxious it would have been for people in Calmsky to drive all the way into the mountains and up a canyon in order to go to a doctor’s appointment, especially considering there’s a good chance snow could make the roads temporarily inaccessible during a significant chunk of the year. Plus, he’s from Calmsky, so why not just have a clinic in the town where everyone lives and commute to work like a normal person?

Anyway, Cyrus and Alec, after leaving Dr. Tanner’s kind of ridiculous clinic, hopped on a boat and went to Aureole Island. Yes, really. They went to Aureole Island where they met Zaris who (spoilers for Cloud Bear) explained everything about the Wyz-Skotian after Ranodar twisted her arm a little. Yes, really. To two strange boys she’d only known for a couple hours. Oh—also, Spearshadow used to be the bad guys. I sometimes forget that. Spearshadow showed up, hired by Henry Tolman. Notice the single L in Tollman’s name. It’s not a mistake, that’s how his name was spelled, though I can’t tell you why it changed, and also yes, Tollman saying he has hired Spearshadow Benites in Chapter 30 is a reference to this old plotline.

Tolman hired Spearshadow to go to Aureole Island instead of having Clearlight Benites do his dirty work, and Cyrus, Alec, and Zaris manage to escape because their boat returned just in the nick of time.

Okay, so how did 0.5 Cyrus and Alec even think to go to Aureole, a deserted, ruined island on another continent? Sassa told them to, of course. In 0.5, Sassa had the ability to know things she had no business knowing, and she knew there was a main character futzing around on the island, just waiting to be picked up for the plot. I figured I’d think up a way Sassa knew all that someday in the future.

Instead, I realized the whole thing was pretty contrived, from how Cyrus and Alec got to the island to Zaris explaining huge portions of her backstory for little to no reason. I knew the story would be better if Zaris left on her own, and if Cyrus and Alec continued on their merry way in Xanthon.

As I said above, I decided to throw out the entirety of Draft 0.5 and start fresh. During the next nine months, I solidified and—believe it or not—simplified how Blessings work, figured out the personalities of my main characters, fixed the plot issues, and made a much more believable timeline of events.

Well, now you know. That’s the story of Draft 0.5.