Ten Months or Ten Years
Hello blog,
Were you worried I had forgotten about you?
You would probably be justified for thinking that.
Truth is, when I started this whole writing journey, I didn’t really envision what all it might end up entailing. I’ve talked about that a bit already at length, so I won’t rehash it here. Instead I wanted to take a minute and talk about where I am, ten months on from when I started.
First things first, I’ve learn A LOT concerning the ins and outs of writing a novel. From how the publishing process works, to the ways that genre’s are broken down, nearly every day has involved one discovery or another.
Secondly I’ve learned a whole lot about time in between finishing the first draft and actually submitting the book to an agent or publisher. If you snoop around a writing community for very long you’ll notice people talking at length concerning first drafts. Completing that first draft is a HUGE accomplishment that many authors fail to achieve. For a variety of reasons, writing a book to the end isn’t as easy as it may sound, and it’s easy to feel that once you’ve made it that far, the hard part is over.
Which is kind of how I felt. I got over the hump, it’s all down hill from here!
Oh how silly and foolish that budding author (me) was back then.
Something that I wrote in two months has taken four times that to get ‘right’. Edits, and rewrites, and revisions, and more edits, and more revisions, all to get my manuscript to a point where I could feel justified in sending it out to a number of publishers and agents.
That’s not exactly a set of timelines I feel that I can realistically keep up with year in and year out. I have posted that I have a name for my follow up to Eyes in the Dark. I’ve actually written more than 11,000 words of that follow up book, except I probably haven’t. Looking at where things eventually ended up with EITD, A Fire to a Moth will need to go through some major changes, which likely renders well over half of those already written words obsolete.
In fact, my new Work in Progress as it were is not A Fire to a Moth. Instead it is an as of yet unnamed High Fantasy Novel featuring characters inspired from my 30 year history of playing Dungeons and Dragons. This book is already a month into being written and is very far from even being a quarter of the way done at this point. And that’s perfectly fine by me. With everything I’ve learned, I’m hoping to balance out the writing vs. revising timetable a bit.
There are authors I have met through Twitter, Instagram and other writing communities that have been writing and revising the same book for nearly ten years, and that is the beauty of being an author and a storyteller. There is no right or wrong way. No perfect amount of time and effort spent. When your story is ready, it will find its audience.
Until next time good reader, take care.