You’ve written a book…it’s about 60k (or more). Hot damn! You got it done. I applaud you. Hell, I even offer up the Raccoon Remix of the Madagascar song, “I like to Move it, Move it.”(Follow some links at your own risk…I did NOT download the MP3 from there, was just a good place that offered it up.)
Seriously, you cannot NOT dance to it.
Try it.
I dare you.
Let’s get back to the draft comment. I write a lot – fiction, non-fiction, blogs, etc. I edit a lot. Of other people’s stuff. My own, it’s been a learning process.
And I just rewrote the 1st two chapters of Book 1 of the Goddess Chronicles. I’ve been working on this since 2004. It’s a long process. (The idea came to me during the Romance Writer’s Association Conference in Atlanta, GA that year.) It took awhile for the first story to start to come to me. Thus, the Goddess of Fire was born.
For the record, Books 2 & 3 are written and waiting to be edited as well. Book 4 & 5 are taunting me.
Back to Phyxe, Goddess of Fire, she’s a bitch. (Of course, she’s supposed to be a bitch, fire is HOT.) And she’s not happy at being
Victoria Pratt - Goddess of Fire
bound. (If you glance right, you’ll notice I tend to hunt down great pictures of celebrities for photos to help me focus on my characters…Victoria Pratt was phenomenal as Shalimar Fox on Mutant X, she’s also a great role model in real life. I think she makes a perfect Goddess of Fire.) As far as editing, it’s taking me some time to adjust to the edit process of my own work rather than helping others with adapting their stories/content.
What I’m happy about? All the classes, training, sharing with other writers, and just learning and honing my craft even more each and every day has allowed me to tackle these edits with great focus and limited screw ups.
- Passive voice dead and buried.
- Adverbs, no longer a part of my automatic writing process.
- Added back in the description.
- Learned my action scenes are the strong points. (And learning to weave that skill into every part of the story.)
I swear, I’m tempted to post each chapter up on the site and let it go viral as I rewrite them. LOL. Tempted, but not crazy enough to do so….
Yes. Like you, I have the first few books written for my character series, but I can’t stop rewrites and edits as I learn things to make my writing more effective. I envy guys like Simon R Green and Joe Konrath who have this down to a science. I’m not there yet, but hopefully, with time and effort, I’ll get there.
They’ve got years ahead of us on the entire process…plus, I think they focus only on writing instead of all the additional things we do too