Tag Archives: amwriting

Two of Forty-Eight Hundred (a rough guesstimate)

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What’s your second edit look like? For some reason, I was thinking I’d been all brilliant with this latest project, that my editing would go faster and smoother than the last book because I’d nailed it the first time through. Yeah, well, let’s just say I overestimated my brilliance by just a micrometer. A micrometer to the eleventy-billionth degree.

Sure, I got the basic story going, but I’m rewriting whole chapters into intelligible language, rather than basic phrases that might be understood on a certain dosage of hallucinogenics laced with droplets of my blood. Needless-to-say, editing is not going to be a quick once over.

How could I possibly think it would be easy? Mostly, I think it was just over-eagerness, or simple optimism. I’m way behind on my deadline, so I convinced myself it was fine because the edits would be smooth and I’d be able to catch up some time. Riiiight. Maybe for my next book I can just think really hard at a blank page and the story will fall right out all neat and clean and full of genius. I won’t even bother crossing my fingers…

We have to put in the work. Every time. Every time this is the process. Every time it comes in stages, slowly sculpting it out to its best form. Rushing is a mistake I’ve made, and I won’t again. Sure, some people will be disappointed to have to wait longer, but they’d be more disappointed to get a rushed piece of work. Still, I need to focus and get the work done, regardless of where I’m at with it.

I hope all your projects are moving forward, regardless of the pace that happens.

First Drafts Can Suk it!

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Writing is hard. Like, seriously.

One of my favorite quotes come from All The Bright Places and comments on said fact.

Writing is so difficult that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

And first drafts. Seriously, they can suk it. Like, all of it. They make me wonder if my brain even works. Do I sound like this big of a moron when I speak? I need to stop speaking. Like, when you go back to some quickly jotted notes, and you can’t decipher your own writing, that’s what a first draft is to my thoughts. I’m reading what must be a sentence. There’s a period at the end of a string of words. That’s a sentence, right? But this makes all kinds of sense that is nonsense. How am I supposed to EDIT this into coherency when there isn’t even a base coherency to be found?!

But, somehow, it gets there. Probably with multiple missed chances at brilliance. Those pure moments of genius that didn’t form themselves well onto the page because my meager human existence struggled to decipher, it and it’s now lost forever. Who knows? Maybe my basic fun, adventure novels were meant to be more, if only I’d trained my brain to translate from the muses better.

It’s a question I often see on author posts, asking what part of the processes is their most and least favorite. I could never answer. Well, I can now. First Drafts can SUUUUUK it.

Needless-to-say, I’m a little bit with the struggles right now on my current first draft. It’s not even that I don’t know where its going, or where it is, or what I want to happen. I have a plan for this story. I’ve even written the ending. But I just can’t get the words onto the page.

Maybe I should be the one sukkin it. Maybe I’m just having an aversion to work, because the first draft, I think, is where the most work goes in. The literal creation of something from nothing. I like when it’s finally here, when I can go in and fine-tune, when I can sculpt a clean product from the ragged suggestion of it. That means, finishing this first draft. *insert annoyed, toddler-tantrum expression here*

What do you think? Are you sukkin first drafts, too? Or you just think I don’t have the chops? Go on, be honest 🙂

And here. Let’s all suck it…

A Little Mid-Week Tease

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The first draft of the final book of my Fool’s Path Series is coming along. It’s possible I’m still on track for a summer release…

Here’s a little teaser:

Once upon a time, this story wanted to be a graphic novel.

Hamal blamed Porrima. If he’d never let her into his apartment that evening; if he’d never allowed her to open her laptop to display Zibanitu waiting to speak with him, he might never had taken the simple mission of watching some plain girl. Underestimated. Underplayed. Underwhelmed. Underpaid. So many unders he could associate with everything that had happened since that day. Even the girls he’d met, the girls he’d used to distract himself from his growing attraction to the girl that could never be his had been under. Just like this mission. Underplanned. Underscouted. Undermanned. Un-FUBAR-able.”

Hamal is Dee’s first guardian; her mentor. A human among superior beings, he knows Dee will need more than the help he can give. But he can’t help putting his neck out for her, despite knowing that path will only lead to trouble.

Catching Balance is Book 4 of 4.5. Check the series page here.

Are you a fair reviewer? Message me to get copies 🙂