Happy Holidays and My Writing Jorney

Holiday Wishes

As 2023 begins, I thought it appropriate to offer my hopes that everyone who reads this has had a Merry Christmas and is looking forward to a prosperous and enjoyable year. We missed seeing most of our family this year. Our holiday gathering was on Christmas Eve and only two of our three children and only two of our ten grandchildren attended. We missed those that could not be there. It seems as they all get older and have their own lives, it becomes harder for everyone to schedule the time for family gatherings.

My Writing Journey

My writing journey so far has been full of “who’d-a-thunk-it” moments. I started my first novel in April 2014. At the time I wrote strictly by the seat of my pants. The words flowed easily onto the page as I hand-wrote in a notebook during my lunch break at work. The words flowed easily until I had approximately half of the book written. Then they just stopped. I had writer’s block. I thought the beginning was good, and I knew how the story would end. But somewhere in the middle, I got lost.

The book remained in that state until my retirement nearly two years ago. Not that I was idle during that time. I purchased a book, Writing Fiction for Dummies, Amazon.com: Writing Fiction For Dummies: 9780470530702: Ingermanson, Randy, Economy, Peter: Books by Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy. It helped me do some of the work I hadn’t thought about. Things like getting to know my characters and creating a character bible so I could understand their motivations. It also helped me understand the story’s need for tension and disaster. I liked Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method, How To Write A Novel Using The Snowflake Method (advancedfictionwriting.com). I went through what I had already written trying to determine how it fit the method and where I needed to add more content.

As my retirement approached, I needed to decide how to use my time. Writing became my first choice. It seemed to me I could finish my book in a few months and have it ready for publication. Ha! It turns out, just putting words on the page doesn’t make it ready for other people to read.

I joined a writer group, ACFW, ACFW | American Christian Fiction Writers, and took part in their critique group. Submitting 2500-word sections to other writers for their review and comments. Unfortunately, I didn’t write as well as I thought I did. The grammatical errors were so many it made it difficult to get comments on the actual content. I purchased ProWritingAid editing software, ProWritingAid: AI Writing Assistant Software, to help me learn and correct those errors before submitting anything to someone else. I blogged about it around that time.

With the help of those resources, I finished writing the first draft of the novel in November of 2021, approximately 6 months after I retired. I began rewriting based on the suggestions and comments from the critique group. The following draft was completed and formatted into a manuscript, which I sent to Beta readers in September 2022. I had a book I was comfortable sending to strangers to read. Now I am going through another rewrite based on the Beta reader comments.

As an optimist, I believe I can finish it sooner rather than later. But it never occurred to me that two years after my retirement, I would still not have a book ready to publish. Currently, it appears the rewrite will not be complete until mid-2023. Then it goes to a developmental editor, followed by more rewriting before copy editing and line editing. I’m not sure the book will be ready to publish until 2024. Who’d-a-thunk-it?

Since writing is more fun than editing or rewriting, I started a second book and finished the first draft earlier in December. The critique group has commented on approximately half of it. So, in the past two years, I have finished the first draft of one book and written the first draft of a second. Hopefully, the second book will be ready for readers faster than the first.