Editing is the Devil

I have been writing for a long time. When I was younger, I filled my notebooks with poems. By middle school, I was writing short stories and one awesome play about the trials that come with becoming a teenager. I had so many notebooks and hard disks with my work that I lost track of them all. Then I stopped writing for nearly ten years. Creative constipation was painful and life-altering. Thank God, I started writing again.

I never realized I wanted to be a published author . So, unfortunately, when I wrote stories and novels, I did not write them with an end goal in mind. I wrote until the stories were told, and the characters felt satisfied enough to fade away. The holes were acceptable. Whatever length or condition it was in was fine. The fact that I wrote out of order was not a problem.

Do you see the problem yet?

In 2018, I decided to try my hand at writing fantasy. I love the genre and thought it would be fun to create my own shifters and witches. I fell in love with the characters but struggled a little with world-building, which wasn’t a revelation. I didn’t know if I wanted to stick to the normal rules of shifters and witches, create my own lore, or a hybrid of the two. I knew I wasn’t skilled enough at describing settings to create a world or city, so I had to decide on a setting that I could pull off and make my own.

And then I wrote. And wrote……. And produced sooooo many chapters. Even a few chapters for the sequel emerged.

Fast forward to last year. I woke up one day and decided this thing should see the world. I wasn’t ambitious about it. I wasn’t picturing best-seller lists and movie deals. It was just a declaration. The mammoth book without a title will be published within two years.

Cue a year of pain and suffering.

I hate editing! Especially this book because I pivoted so often that I created a nightmare. Midway through, I changed the point of view and later changed the tense. My editing software garbled it twice. One editing program froze my computer every time I opened the document. And all that is before professional edits.

This has been a test of my patience and perseverance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to throw out my computer or print this damn book so I could rip up the pages into teeny tiny pieces. I pictured myself setting each piece on fire with a magical fire that would not burn down my house. I’m dramatic and traumatized, not crazy.

Wooosaaaaa

I am happy to announce that I am close to a polished, finished manuscript. The beta reader edits are done, as are most of the rewrites. After staring at the screen for hours, I’ve gotten this labor of love from 159,828 words to 141,245. Hopefully, I can eliminate another 10-20k words between now and when I hand it over to my editor. Seriously, I’m trying not to freak out. I need to have this thing wrapped up and shipped off in a month, and I don’t know how to fix this one character issue. But I got this far. One of these days, I will be announcing a release date. There is light at the end of this tunnel!

I definitely learned lessons along the way. I (probably) could do this for a living…maybe. I’ll reevaluate when the mammoth is published and selling.