Before I dive into the transcript + links mentioned, TWO THINGS.
First, I just want to let everyone know there is a B&N 25%-off pre-order sale going! In other words, what better time to order my two books coming out later this year? 😌
Second, I have a very cool, very fun cover reveal extravaganza happening for Witchlight over on my
, and I thought some of you might want to join in the fun!
Now onto the main event! That book I just keep coming back to, even after fifteen years.
Links Mentioned:
Transcript:
Hi friends. I am here today to talk about Screechers. You may recall, if you were a paid subscriber back in 2023 when I did, like, a deep dive edit—like rewrote the book for the 80,000,000th time. And if not, if you don't remember that, then I will reintroduce the book here.
I've been working on this book for 15 years. This will be the 15th year. It has been through, through many, many, many iterations. And I think it's a testament to the book…to the world, I should say, and the characters that I keep coming back to it and haven't just abandoned it.
But I took a long break from it, from, like, 2017 (when I had shared the first chunk of the book on a short-lived app called Ampersand that I was a part of) and then present. Well, 2023 when I decided to, like, dive in again, look at it and redo it.
And because I had grown so much as a writer, I really ended up gutting the book pretty dramatically, and now I am diving back in. And I promised at that time, in 2023, that I would keep you guys updated on different changes and edits that I was making to the book as it happened.
You can see all the edits I made back in 2023 and I’ll link to those posts below, but they are paid. Or you can access that same information if you're part of the Writing Academy (the Susan Dennard Writing Academy). Either place. It's compiled maybe more nicely in the Academy, but the Academy also cost $99, and to be a paid subscriber, you only have to be $5 for a month.
Anywho…I should probably not tell you that and ask you instead to pay me more. This is why I don't make very much money, and my agent is constantly shaking me.
Anywho! Back to Screechers. So I pulled the book out this year because I need to work on it for reasons that…I guess I can get into a little bit.
Essentially, I need to write a short story for…something. A sci fi short story, and my agent feels like the smart move would be to take Screechers and build something, write something in that world. So I tried to do that!
But classic, Susan, I'm really bad at short stories. I've talked about this before at length. They were always very long. They're not short stories, they're long stories, and they turn into novelettes and novellas. Somehow I cannot… I can either write really short or it's just long.
So what happened, though, in my attempt, I spent about a week trying to, like, figure out how to make a short story in this Screechers world, digging through everything I'd written before, old drafts, old versions. The one from 2023, which I do really like still. Like, you got it there! You got the voice! You finally nailed (I hope) it.
But rather than end up actually creating a short story, as I'm supposed to be doing, I just ended up revising more of the book to match the new tone and tense. So I wanted to share some of that.
It's a little bit hard, um, to share fully, because I….Just a second. My cat!
I'm back. It's a little hard to share fully, like, with the same detail that I did in 2023 because I didn't keep that information. That was silly of me. I was pretty much editing in Scrivener, as one does, and also sort of writing anew but I will do my best to share new versions. They're rough. They're very rough, and share…
Which, by the way, will continue to be for paid subscribers. If you're gonna read my really rough first drafts, you gotta pay.
But I don't mind, for everybody, talking more in depth about the changes that I am continuing to make in this book.
So one of the first things that I did when I dove into the revisions of 2023 was to age it up.
Tonally…actually, character wise, everyone was the right age. The problem was that the tone was skewing YA. It just was. It did not feel like adult fantasy, which was the genre I was going for—a weird kind of magicless fantasy. And so I really wanted to rewrite everything with a different tone in mind.
It's hard to explain, and if you are a paid subscriber, then you can see the big differences, and hopefully feel that difference when you read. But I also wanted…I ended up changing the tense from third person past to third person present.
One, because I like that. That's like my go-to now, ever since The Luminaries. And two, because I just think it…it actually…
The fun thing about third person present is that it, contrary to what you might expect, it builds a natural distance in between the reader and the narrator. And on the one hand, it can add immediacy because things are happening in the present, but in the present tense, we tend to default more to what I call “filter words.” Or you can default to them more.
I choose to, in certain instances, when I want to build in that distance. And so (and I will link to my very, very, very old post on filter words below), but I like to employ them. I think they feel natural when you work in present tense, in a way. Like they flow out more naturally to me than in third person past, and so I intentionally wanted that distance for certain elements.
Kind of like with The Luminaries, there's this almost sentient element to the world that I want you to feel on every page. In particular, especially in certain POVs. Um, and so, yeah, third person present was the natural choice then for that, and it felt really good…and sorry excuse me.
I make—as I talked about in my last post—I make like a big pot of coffee, but the actual pot doesn't retain heat long enough, so I put it in the thermos. And thermoses aren't very good for pouring. They just aren't.
Anywho! Where was I? Right, so with this new tone and distance built in to the POVs, I redid what I had, and I break…I broke down in past posts, some of the big, bigger, more macro edits that I was grappling with. In terms of character. In terms of where I was taking the story, because I didn't like where I had been taking the story in 2010 when I first started this. 2011, 2012 as I was more deeply diving in and editing it and writing it. I just…
It didn't feel mature enough anymore to me, and I…yeah, it didn't feel natural. I didn't like where it was going.
And so it's interesting, because I am someone who, if the emotions work, then what I will do is rework plot around the emotions. Like I will keep the bones the same. Executioners Three is a perfect example of this, in that if you were to compare the Wattpad version to the finished version, every beat is the same on an emotional level. Very little of the dialogue—nothing, almost nothing changes.
Except it's also dramatically different, because I have adjusted some of the world building. And then the mystery cluesand what information Freddie actually uncovers in every scene changes. But the act of uncovering does not, and so it's like a body that has a different…I don't know, different outfit on, but it's still the same body.
That's not a great analogy, but you get the idea. Screechers is the same. There are so many bones that are strong. The emotional progression, particularly between characters—like, I love what I came up with. I can see where I was in flow and just following people where they wanted to go in the main setting.
But I want the broad bones…I want the broad “outfit,” story, primary setup to be different.
And one of the big changes that I have decided to make this time around is to like go fully sci fi. I had been dancing with it. I had been dancing with it, but I just was afraid that sci fi would be more than I could chew, or necessarily wanted to chew.
Fantasy has always been the thing I write, even though I read plenty of sci fi. But I because of this short story, I decided to just fully commit. We're going to make it fully sci fi, and in doing so, I'm going to tweak the world a little bit. And originally it was like all these different cultures, people from one continent, kind of like the Witchlands, but not really, because it's such an inhospitable continent. There's just not that many places to live. And they all descend…they all came from one location.
But I decided, like that's so perfectly set up to just be planets. They all came from one planet as they slowly inhabited a galaxy. There you go. And this one planet, Shaava, ends up being where almost all of the story happens. In fact, definitely where all the story happens.
But my characters, some of my characters, are from different planets instead of different cities. Does that make sense? It's a subtle change, but it was very easy to change because so much of the world already had tech and things built into it. So I don't know why I was not willing to commit to this sooner.
Plus, it opened up the possibility that the main threat now, rather than being—I had been skewing fantasy, so like some kind of magical threat--now, is more technological. Alien, perhaps. Something like that. Which just feels good. It feels right. I'm into it. I'm feeling it. I like it.
So that's sort of the big change that's been happening in this latest draft.
I have not yet edited. So if you access all of the past scenes that I edited and shared, it was all one person's POV, for the most part. Echo. She's the main core character of the story, I should say, even though there are plenty of other POVs. She's sort of our…what's the word I'm looking for?
Like, where the domino starts? Like she's the one who's having the most impact and ripple effect everywhere, even if there are other POVs doing things. (LOL: SOOZ NOTE WHILE MAKING THE TRANSCRIPT. THE WORD I WANTED WAS CATALYST.)
So, um, I have not fully…have not gone in and made these changes to her already-edited scenes to, like, make it sci fi—only because it's not going to change a whole lot for her. She still lives in the middle of nowhere in this outpost far from the main city. She still has all these kids she's in charge of because screechers (these monsters that live on the planet) killed everyone. Except she was able to save all these kids, and they're starving. They're running out of everything. And it's, it's really very little that will change. There's just a few things that I want to change.
(For those of you who've read, when the scorpions soldiers come, those would now be my I don't want to give anything away, but my main bad guys from another planet or galaxy.)
And so it's a subtle change. And so it doesn't change anything in terms of, like, remember my very bad bones, body, clothes analogy? It barely changes the clothes. Like, all I'm doing is changing the buttons.
So I'm not I didn't bother to re edit that. Instead, I started with another POV instead, who you may recall, if you were following the Screechers journey, I didn't know what to do with him. He is probably the other main POV. Starker is his name. He's from another planet. He's from the planet where everyone in the galaxy originated from, but he's lived on this planet, Shaava, for most of his life
But, you know, they’re different people. They look different from growing up in different environments for generations, different gravities, etc, etc. He's obviously an offlander, but he's also Shaavan, so he's been an interesting character to play with. But I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with him the last editorial round.
And this time around, because I didn't want to change my body (just the clothes) I was able to see a way to bring him in exactly the way that I brought him in in my very early draft from 2012-ish.
I will share those scenes for the paid subscribers to see how I changed, like how I took what I had before, and redid it. New present tense.
I have a tendency and first drafts to like overthink. Everyone's thinking a lot and feeling feelings and maybe not doing a whole lot, and I'll have, like, too many action tags. So it's like she stood up, turned and walked across the room, when all I really need to say is she walked across the room. Like, obviously she had to stand and turn to do that.
And so I you'll see--you can see how I really tightened things.
But now he's set up. He's where I need him in the story to flow into Echo's story. And the two of them are not together. But this is where I am now. Instead of just editing and even rewriting, I am, like completely changing some things, and I don't have anything yet to share. But I will when I do. If I do anytime soon, or whenever I eventually really fully tackle this.
Because, going back to my body analogy: the body has changed now. Because I changed a few small things in Starker’s POV and Echo’s, now when they meet for the first time, when he shows up at her outpost, the emotions are different.
Okay, so because of that, some of the original body just doesn't feel right anymore. I don't think Echo would respond to the way that I have her initially responding or feeling the way that I have her initially feeling. And I don't think he, as well, would make some of the same choices. So…I'm trying to…
It got a little crunchy yesterday as I was trying to edit that and feel my way through, so I'm gonna work on that today with my Remarkable. I saved a PDF of what I had so far written and rewritten in this part of the text, and I'm going to work through by hand. I just find that easier than staring at my screen trying to figure something out. Sometimes, just seeing it on paper, I can very clearly put things together—that bird's eye view—that I just cannot do the same way in Scrivener on a screen.
Yeah, this was a very long introduction and explanation, but I will be sharing some more Screechers stuff. This was all setup to let you know that and that Ill be sharing more Screecher stuff for paid subscribers. But also, that I'm working on it again—because I promised all of you who were part of that journey two years ago (year and a half ago?), that I would be updating you whenever I worked on it again.
And then also because…sort of the moral of all of this, the heart of all of this, is that some books take a very long time to get right.
Like I cannot overstate how many times I have rewritten and redone this book, how many iterations it's gone through. Yet there's still something that I keep coming back to. So just because it didn't work, in 2010—and the very first version of the book I wrote 2010 for NaNoWriMo…pffft. BAD.
I ended up, the only thing I saved was Echo's name. And the screecher monsters. That was it. And then, like this sort of desert vibe. Then I wrote the new version, a new version. So…I scrapped, threw all of that out. Had a new idea, new version. I wrote that in 2011, 2012, and I got pretty far. It's like 90,000 words…
Then petered out. I had my books coming out. We were moving to the US. It was not something that seemed sellable, so it was something I only dabbled in when I was feeling it. (You guys know me and my rivers. I follow where the Muse takes me for a bit). And then I only dug it out again to fully edit in 2017 for this Ampersand app.
And now here we are. 2023. Dove in again. Here we are, 2025. Somehow diving in again.
What I find, and I talked about this in a previous post, I will see if I can find it, because I love it. I love what Max Gladstone said about a series of choices. Some books just require so many more choices before you finally get them where you wanted them to be or where they need to be for everything to settle into place.
Executioners Three required many choices. But it's also smaller. It's one POV. It's a mystery. Once it's solved, it's solved. So once I locked in and in the series of choices and iterations of that story got me where I needed to go, I was moving.
Screechers…My hope is it will be the same once I get these things locked in. Now that I've also fully committed to this sci fi direction, um, hopefully that, you know, cinches things in place and the series of choices are finally moving me where I want them to move me.
And I don't regret any of that.
Like, there was one point where I lost—because I was using a new, an early beta version of Scrivener (I know, it was that long ago!)—that I lose everything that I had written. Everything. Fortunately, I had some drafts backed up, but I lost a lot of words, and I was really disheartened, and so I just set it aside for a long time.
I don't regret any of that. Now. It's easy to say with hindsight and all that, but I just don't. I don't look back and think, Man, I'm so frustrated. Like, yeah, maybe a little frustrated that the very first draft wasn't it and I couldn't get it right.
But some books don't work that way.
As I've talked about in my proposal post, Two For Joy, this book that I'm hoping to maybe sell, it was the easiest thing. It just poured out of me in a two-week frenzy of beauty and joy and glory, and almost nothing has changed in edits with my agent.
But every book is not like that. It's just not every book is as simple and straightforward. Something about Magpie’s story just, I had all the pieces I needed, and I could go. And I don't…I just haven't had that with Screechers.
I've had Echo, I've had Starker, I've had Laetma and Lu (these other characters). But I couldn't see….couldn't see….I hit 90,000 words and was like pffft. For years. And that's okay.
One more thing before I go, for those of you—I meant to say this earlier—who were part of this Screechers journey, there was a character everyone really liked. Me too. Her name is Sun, but I've cut her. Part of the reason I've cut her is because I think she was holding me back.
Like I was not killing my darlings because I liked it, because I liked her. I liked the emotions, but I was running out of like, what to do with her, and I kept coming up with the same wall every time. And so I have committed to cutting her this time around. I think she's still going to be a character (although I might make her a guy, for reasons I can't share right now) but she…
That role in the book…Sun is this child Empress type thing. And I've changed that. I've changed the way the world is, like Shaavan political structure is built so, like, there's not even a child empress anymore. Plus, I can't…I don't want to say anything, because I'd rather share this as I go and you guys see what comes, but I don't want to be in her head.
It would be better not knowing what this character is doing. So cut. Which amazing, unsurprising that choice has now opened up a bunch of other choices for me.
So should have killed that darling a long time ago, but it's okay. That's okay. We don't always know. Distance, time. They give us new ideas. They let our subconscious do what we need them to do until we can sit back down.
All right, I also need to figure out how to make a short story from the Screechers world. So wish me luck. Wish me luck on that, friends, and yeah, that's your Screechers and editing update for the moment.
If you want to see the changes I've made, upgrade to paid, and I will be sharing that when I get it compiled.
And yeah, kill your darlings if you have to. But also, if you really love a book, hang on to it. You can always rewrite it and redo it and make more choices to get it where you need it to be.
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