Hello fellow word lovers! I hope your holidays have been going the way you planned and no coal was found in your stockings. But I have some very exciting news… are you ready? I finally finished my first rough draft, five days before Christmas! I have been on cloud nine for a whole week.
Of course, I had planned on posting this great news sooner, but it has been a busy holiday season for my family and I as we work through the grief of our losses from this summer. So my blog post kinda fell between the cracks for my “Before” Christmas post. But here I am! So down to the details.
My First Rough Draft
Word Lovers, I must profess, this is my first time EVER completing a novel from beginning to end. I’m not even kidding! I have three other novels that I have been working on before I started this project, that I have yet to make it to the big climax of the story. One novel, in particular, I started writing while I was deployed to Iraq, fourteen years ago people! Granted I’ve had three laptops die on me since I’ve started that novel. Which I had to start over each time because all of my work disappeared, even the disk and storage devices that I stored copies on seem to have grown legs somehow.
So with that being said, I am super excited about the next phase. And I’m not going to lie, I have the urge to just sit down and write the next book in the series right this second. I want to finish one of my other novels, start a completely new novel, and edit my book. But, I can’t do it all.
Pump the breaks, no editing for a month!
I know what you’re thinking, I must be crazy not to strike while the iron is hot. I need to jump right into the first round of edits so I can get this puppy off to some Beta Readers. Hey, I totally agree with you. I should be head first in my novel, finding my mistakes.
But I ask you, how do I know what’s a mistake and what is pure genius writing? Yeah, I’m pretty sure if you’re new to this like me, you’re wondering the same thing. How DO I edit? What type of things or mistakes am I looking for? Yes, I can dive in and find sentence structures that need tweaking and grammatical errors. But when I do my first major round of edits, I want to clean up a big chuck in one swoop.
So I plan on upping my game, so to speak. With any skill that we acquire in life, there is always a need to improve said skills. So for the month of January, I will be learning more writing skills. Expanding my knowledge of weaving words into worlds that we all fall in love with.
How I plan to improve my writing.
As newbie writers, we are told a million times that in order to improve we must do two things: Write every day, and read as much as possible! Both true facts, but as a newbie, we need more than that. We need to stop being afraid of starting our work, that’s our biggest challenge, followed by being able to take criticism and getting a habit going or schedule.
So, first things first. I have a nice stack of books on writing that I have acquired from Writer’s Digest, either from the workshops I have taken or that I purchased when was I sent a discount code during a sale. One of these books help pull me out of my writing slump, and I never even finished it.
My plan is to read two books a month on writing and/or just reading in general. I really lost my zest for reading this past year and fell into a creative block of sorts. I’m not sure if the books I’ve been trying to read just suck, or my brain just went on a vacation and took my concentration with it. I don’t know.
But the writing bug has infected me, I have to write!
Yes! I am on a high and I need to write. There is no denying that fact. So what should I do in this situation? I know I need to improve my plot, fine tune my characters personalities, and do some more world building, but those are the things I plan to learn during this month break.
So what, are you just going to let that great momentum go, I mean you just got your creativity back, you can’t let it slip away! You’re so very right my fellow word lover. Remember those other three books I talked about earlier in this post? Taking what I’ve already learned from reading five chapters of a book, I plan on using this time to apply that to at least one of my other novels.
I will get the same process going and began to set up my other novels to this same point that got me through my current novel. My current novel is more of an Urban Fantasy that takes place in my current hometown. Whereas my other three novels have a lot of word building that needs to be done and could use some fine tuning before going any further with the writing.
So that’s it for this post word lover, see ya next time!
Chronicles of a Newbie Writer 