Once I finished the first draft of Where Weavers Daire and uploaded it to the writing group, some 3 weeks late after my promised deadline, I came off my victory lap and woke up the next morning with poster’s remorse.
Remorse because the first draft of anything is shit.
And boy did I see how I should’ve eliminated things and introduced characters sooner and and and and I need a better ending, now, I’m going to have to gut a lot of the 147k behemoth into something readable and enjoyable.
Which is a good thing since It’s 47k words over my imposed ceiling.
This is where my alpha readers and writing group comes in to tell me characters sound the same and why is everyone acting normal?
If you don’t have alpha/beta readers to critique your work it’s time to find some…legally. Don’t hunt people down for sport only to ask them to read the next great masterpiece, it doesn’t work like that.
I’ve been using Google Drive for editing so having the iPad open to scroll through the edits and the laptop open to go line by horrible line.
I’m glad I decided not to push this to the limit and try and get it edited and published through Createspace. It would’ve been waste of time and money.
I have started to collect names of agents that cover sci-fi and once I get done with the second or third draft I’ll think about querying.
Better to put my best foot forward than slip across the floor on a banana peel of misspellings and heinous plot lines that go nowhere.
Official Blog of author R. K. Bentley
Testing.