Hello and thank you for visiting my website!
I finally feel like I’m close to completing my first novel, so I thought it might be a good time to start setting up some sort of online presence. I’m somewhat of a socially-anxious recluse and don’t participate in social media (at least not until now.)
Even though I could write out my whole life story in this post, I’ll save it for my about page. I’m starting this blog (and twitter) to push myself out of my comfort zone and get my thoughts out in the wild. For too long, I’ve hidden away in fear of not being good enough to put any of my work out there. Honestly, I’m still quite anxious about the whole thing, but I’ll never get anywhere if I don’t try.
During the pandemic, I started getting into reading again. It was something I’d put out of my hobbies for several years. The more I read, the more I felt inspired to work on my own worlds. This led me on an adventure through my past literary attempts. Before college, and working full-time, I’d actually devoted quite a bit of time to dreaming up various unfinished fantasy worlds.
The Novel
There was one story in particular that I’d written during a particular rough time in my life. I’d started it during National Novel Writing Month, blew past the 50,000 word goal and kept writing into the the next year to an ultimate 110,000 words. It felt amazing to finally finish a story, and to finish at such a magnitude was incredible to me at the time. Afterwards, I locked it away. Moved on with my life and never wrote anything like it again.
Then the great 2020 Pandemic happened. As mentioned earlier, I started reading a ton of novels. I was reading every night before bed. I finally decided it was time to revisit my creation and look at it was new eyes after so many years. I was instantly swept back into it, as the characters I’d created came back to me. It felt like I’d met up with my long lost family, and I didn’t realize how much I’d missed them.
It was time to get to work. I began by reading through my first draft, which was absolutely awfully formatted and honestly embarrassing. I slowly reworked and rewrote each paragraph to flow better and fix some of my terrible old grammar. Then I worked on refining parts of the plot, character development, and other issues that weren’t very apparent on my first writing
After several months of daily work, I’ve nearly completed my third revision. Currently it is around 92,000 words. I’m planning a fourth revision to tie up a few loose plot threads and fix my dialogue. After that, I believe I will have taken my editing as far as I can possibly take it alone…At least without nitpicking for the next ten years. Maybe at that point I’ll have the courage to start submitting it to some professionals.
So here we go, this journey starts here.