Gut Feelings

I feel marvelously ahead on reading. I chalk it up to my tablet allowing me to read books a little more inexpensively than would otherwise be.

Right now, I'm close to the end of Lab Rat One, the second book in the Touchstone Trilogy, and I've paused for now to savor it. It's so fun! I will likely re-read this series more than once. I also started Tigerlily, the sequel to Pinelight (which I will be reviewing here tomorrow) and I really like it as well. To cap it all off, I'm about halfway through a clever little novel, book one in The Toadhouse Trilogy.

Back in the day, I used to do stuff like that, read three books at a time. I'd let my mind get comfortable in one, and later, when I picked up another one, it was always a little jarring to transition between worlds like that. Jarring, but fun. Lately, I've even been getting that same sort of feeling while editing or writing. Sometimes the characters or scenes linger long after I've shut my notebook. It's encouraging, and with 31 pages of editing to go in the draft of Book 1, it's nice to feel like I'm doing something right.

I pressed on with book 2 last night, and from this point forward will be writing in first person perspective. It's getting easier and doesn't sound as stiff. I feel like I've really found the voice of my main character, and that is a wonderful thing. Now that I've gotten all comfy with that, it does mean more editing than I anticipated, but I do feel like I've suddenly found the right direction after getting turned around in a maze. I was getting pretty frustrated before. I haven't done a test page yet, but changing the perspective feels right for me.

Don't be afraid to make changes when you really feel like you need to. When it comes to a story you really care about, gut feelings can be right a lot of the time. Of course, don't rush to change things too drastically unless you want to have more frustration later. Test the waters, try things out, and play with your story a little. You'll know if the change is right.

And now I better get to work.

Hunger

I'm excited because I've reached the first peak in this stage of the novel, which involves editing. This was editing at its most basic form, correcting spelling errors and problems with capitalization and punctuation that resulted from me only typing fast without stopping to clean things up a bit. So that's done, and officially the book has 58,052 words.

It's one annoying peak, but there are a few more ahead. There's at least one more scene I need to write from scratch, and there's a lot of refining that needs going at the end. In my haste, those parts ended up choppy. Part of that is the main character and how she thinks. A lot of it isn't.

Maybe you've read a little about the iPhone's development history. The phone was almost done. They'd put the thing together. It was a phone, a nice, sleek, gorgeous Apple product that was, on the outside, a whole package.

On the inside, it didn't work.

Steve Jobs said, "We don't have a product yet."

Well, I don't have a book yet. There are almost 60,000 words of what is structured like a book. What looks like a manuscript. The manuscript contains a story. There's even a name, and I toy with cover design ideas in my head.

But I don't have a book yet.

I'm close, but one thing I won't do is publish now. It's not ready. There's stuff I need to say, and although I now have what I can call a rough draft, it needs to cook.

I'm pretty excited, though. The first draft is finished, and the story is cooking.

And, I must say, I'm pretty hungry.

Fun With Editing

As I write this, the second draft of my book, as I proceed through the first round of editing, is 52,027 words long.

I'm pretty excited about that number, because while I'm getting close to the end, I'm not there yet. That means the book will be long, but not too long. The other week I put together an estimate draft of all the rough pieces, not altered at all, copied and pasted into one document, just to see. It had 52,269 words.

Yes, I did add some story at the beginning, to ground the main characters and allow a picture of them at the most normal their life will ever be for the rest of the story.

I'm excited that this book is getting longer than I thought it would be, and intimidated by the fact that other books in the genre have more words. The Hunger Games, for example, has around 90,000. I Googled that, by the way. I don't nerd that much.

Me and editing have a love/hate relationship. I love that the story is taking shape and becoming more of what I want it to be. I hate that I can't just turn out the perfect book in one shot, but that's really not possible.

So it's been quiet on my end because I've been trying to truly finish this book. This draft is for working out all the typos that resulted when I typed from the raw draft and only focused on getting words on the screen. Working at an insane pace means I can get to the meaty editing, where all the story kinks will be worked out. Hopefully that means I'll have some bits at the beginning of the book, which I'll up here and probably on Wattpad or something. Fiction Press, too, if I feel so inclined. Once I'm happy with it, it's time for formatting and cover design, because this baby's gonna be an e-book first. Then I'll dive into print book design.

Whee.

Also, it's Friday. Who doesn't love that?