During this period of stay-at-home, I was going through my debut novel “Magic: The Power of Tel-ana” when a realization hit me with the full force of a Semi-Wheeler.
It just wasn’t that good.
Now, I know that nobody’s debut novel will be the best in history, but when I stepped back and looked at it, I realized that I made a lot of rookie writer mistakes: my book was too short, too cliche, and gramatically a mess. It was amazing that I even allowed it to become published. I did so many things wrong when I was both writing it and searching around for a publisher. The publisher I settled on (another mistake) did accept fantasy submissions but their bread and butter was Christian fiction (you can see that influence in the book cover).
All this was a bitter pill to swallow, but like all medicine, it needed to be taken.
I knew I could make it better. So I decided to do just that, make it better. I was in such a hurry to get my book out there in the world for people to read that I cut too many corners and left it an anorexic shadow of what I knew it could be. So for the past two months, I’ve been working on a massive rewrite of it. This time, older, more experienced, wiser (?).
What I did was after rewriting my original novel, complete with mispellings (my original master copy was on a hard disk so I couldn’t access that), I made a copy of it. In this “second draft,” I decided to make the revisions. The purpose of making this draft is so if I decide that I don’t like the corrections I made, I could just delete the second draft and duplicate a new one. This will also help me keep track of the word count and see if I’m heading in the right direction.
Writing the changes I wanted to make in the second draft (I used MS Word’s Comments feature to show where and what changes I wanted to make) took me over a month. Eventually I finished and what I did then was create a duplicate of the second draft (which I call “Third Draft.” Original, huh?) with which I will apply my changes. As I applied my changes, I would delete the comments in the third draft. So how would I remember the changes I made/wanted to make? Well, I would keep the second draft open in the background for reference. As it turned out, this made applying the changes easier.
There’s still a whole lot to do though, and I’m not even sure this will be the draft that I submit for publication (for those of you who are curious, I still hold the rights). But I’m definitely in a lot better state when it comes to my writing than I was ten years ago.
I hope you join me on this adventure.
Harold Ray's Writings 