My latest short story "The Night the Lights Came On"

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

More Hiking and Revising My Novel Through the Smoke


Smoke has covered our town like a blanket. This weekend we went to the Wenatchee area to do a couple hikes over the Labor Day Weekend and get some delicious food in Leavenworth. We had to turn around halfway up toward one of the hikes because the smoke was so bad. We re-routed and found a different hike in the opposite direction away from the smoke and had fun swimming in a lake there. Now back at home our kids can't go outside for recess and I can smell smoke in my cube at work. It's really bad. Man I hope some rain comes soon...

On a lighter note the revising of my novel is coming along. In my last blog post about it I was in chapter 31 and now I'm revising chapter 38! Oops I just realized I haven't been updating the progress meter. Okay, fixed! Only 11 chapters to go and then I can write the last chapter. I didn't write the last chapter yet because when I got to the end of my first draft I changed the mentor character into also being the love interest. So as I've gone through my first revision pass I've been changing the gender of that character and when I get to the last chapter I'm hoping to have a better idea of where their relationship stands. I have everything resolved in the second to last chapter except that. So when I get through chapter 49 I'll be all caught up and I'll be able to write the last chapter. Then the story will be done!

At that point I'll listen through the story one more time on my phone and hopefully catch any last little typos. Then when I hit the last chapter I'll revise that - then it's off to beta readers! I'm so excited about this because this will be the first time I write a novel without having to do rewrites. If it's good enough after I get feedback, it will also be the first full length novel I publish. That is very exciting and I think it will be good enough!

So this is what the process will be for this novel:
  1. Write the rough draft
  2. Go through the finished manuscript and revise it
  3. Do one last pass listening to the book
  4. Hand it off to Beta Readers
  5. Make edits based on their feedback
  6. Hand the polished manuscript off to an editor or two
  7. Make one final polish from their notes
  8. Publication!


All three novels I've written before this needed huge rewrites after I finished them. One of those I have rewritten several times and I still don't think it's good enough to publish. The other two I never touched and they remain trunked in their first draft form. I'm really excited that my planning and outlining has spared me from that on this story. I hope to replicate this with every novel I write moving forward. So, that's what I'm up to. My goal is to get this bad boy published by October so I can sell it around Halloween. It is called "Haunted House Flipper" after all :) Thanks for stopping by!

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