Beginning Again

Put in about six hours since my last update. Got super drunk Friday which meant no writing on Saturday. Put in my time today though.

Got another 5 book bloggers on my list to hit up when this book comes out. All I'm waiting on now is the cover. Really getting tired of waiting. Really getting tired of writing about getting tired of waiting. Just want it to be out.

I started a new book this past week, and I don't want to say this is the hardest beginning I've ever had, because I do remember deleting like 15,000 words in two different novels--but it is certainly tough. I stopped during my period of writing twice today, for like ten minutes, and thought whether or not I could write a book like this. I kept writing, but I'm still not sure. 

I'm about a thousand words in, and the book will be at least 70,000 words, with perhaps multiple volumes to complete it. This will probably be the biggest thing I've attempted yet, but that doesn't scare me. That's not why I'm doubting this.

I'm unsure how it's going to play out. The beginning and the end are solid in my mind, as they always are when I start a novel--but the whole middle piece is a cloud. The idea of being able to turn this into something exciting, because believe me--it seems like much of the middle has to be dull as of right now--is beyond daunting. 

I'm going to write on it some more this week. There's a character I'm developing that I think I've already fallen in love with, partly because he's the only character that is based largely off of me--or rather, what I wish I could be. I don't want to just give up on it, because I remember feeling much the same with the other three novels I wrote in the beginning. A vague uneasiness that there is no way I can put this all onto paper. Or the computer screen, I suppose.

I'm going to plug away, and hopefully my mind is able to grasp the words that will get this thing out of my head. If not, I'll be pretty disappointed.

I really like falling in love with myself, and such.

How I Wrote It

Tomorrow the editing begins. I'm ready for it. Ready to be done with this, ready to be put it out into the world. Ready to hear some form of feedback. 

I have other book ideas, but pushing those out aren't really concerning me right now. Having this done, that is all that really matters. 

I'm trying to setup book tours right now. One author emailed over 500 book bloggers. I'm going through a company to do it--I'm going to outsource until it gets to expensive to do so.

Onto today's topic.

For writers, I think there is a certain uncertainty when it comes to the specific way they write. I know there was for me for a long time. Actually, up until this novel I did not figure out the way that I write best. I've been writing since I was nineteen and I wrote this novel at the ripe, old age of 25. That's six years of writing, plus serious studying of how other writers completed their works. 

So I figure, I'll lay out my path to completing a novel in case anyone is ever interested. It took two novels for me to get there, two novels and another writer beating the shit out of me every time I let him look at a piece of my work. All I cared about was pushing out ideas, getting them on paper as fast as I could, and moving onto next. This led to a prolific amount of words, but quite a few of them were horrible.

So when I sat down to write this novel, I said: Beers, you gotta slow down. How can you make yourself slow down? 

The answer was easy. Write with a blindfold over your eyes. 

I kid, I kid.

What I did was write two pages. Then I went back and hand wrote those two pages, then typed them back up. 

That didn't work either. It kept breaking the creative process, so by the time I finished rewriting, I had forgotten where in the hell the chapter was headed. So I needed a way to slow down and to keep the creativity flowing.

I decided to do the same thing, but with chapters. As I was writing, I read a book by Joe Hill, and at the end he said he had five drafts for the thing. The most I had ever done was two, and that's what I appeared to be doing now.

What did that tell me? I wasn't slowing down enough. 

Currently, I was typing out a chapter, handwriting, and then retyping it in. I decided to add two more steps to it. Once I had retyped the chapter, I printed it out, read it over and made corrections on paper. Then I put the corrections back in. Finally, I read the chapter aloud, making corrections there.

I did that through 70,000 words. Each chapter constructed by itself, my mind almost lost in it--but I think somewhere the rest of the story was working its way out in the back of my mind. Truly, it was the easiest plotting I ever did. Chapter after chapter just came next, without me actually sitting down and writing a single word of plot out (I don't care what anyone says, plotting is the devil). What's crazy, is that it didn't take much editing of the whole book to make the whole plot fit--the pieces just fell where they should, and I think that's because I immersed myself in each chapter and allowed my brain to work through the rest while I was focusing elsewhere.

It took a lot longer to write this one, but I think the end result is a lot better.

Oh yeah, once I finished it, I went back and edited it once more.

First Draft Done

Put in about another nine hours over the past week. Didn't do much at all on the weekend, or Friday. 

Finished a book called Indie Publishing, helped some in the marketing realm and a lot in the publishing realm.

So, the first draft (which really means 6th) is done. I sent it to my editor this morning, and she is going to be the first person to read the thing. I'm nervous. Before writing those two words, I thought if that's what I meant, and I don't think it is. I'm fucking scared. I spent about fourteen months working on this thing. I gave up a lot of time that could have been spent with those I care about, and I put my heart into this thing. I cried at parts when writing and was genuinely scared at others. All of that is a very womanesque way of saying that I put a lot of work into it. I gave it my best.

Now the first person is going to read it and that's going to be a gauge of how well I did. There's going to be a lot more work to put into it, probably another 30-60 hours once her edit is done, but the core of the book is there. The story is told. It either works or it doesn't.

That's scary. 

It worked for me though. 

That's not enough to allow me to do this for a living, but it's still something.