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callsignfate · 8 months

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ACK- long authors note.

(TL;DR: I post once a day minimum, I take too long to edit posts in my own overly complicated way of writing, and it's getting a tad bit out of hand. I love posting, but I want to make sure I have content for the long run. If I post more than once a day, it's kinda a bonus post.)

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Fate here,

I just wanted to let you know that I post once a day. Minimum. If I post more than once in a day, that was just something I finished early, or I decided to post something different the following day and decided why the fuck not?

If you see a vote, that just means I've finished writing all of the things on the vote list, and they just need to be edited. On my last vote, I did say I'd post the top three that day, but the Valeria x fem!reader story (Personal Exile) took WAY longer to edit than I had initially realized. I had added more, didn't like some of it, and rewrote it. It's a process.

For anyone wondering how I write its kinda convoluted. I write on my phone notes app because I'm chronically busy. I live on a farm so it's very 'go go go' with little breaks to go to my computer. So I write a VERY rough draft in my notes app. I then copy and paste it over to my computer to a Google document. It's then in the stage where I read it, rewrite it, and read it again.

After that, it gets looked over on grammarly because I suck with grammar. Finally, it gets read over one more time and briskly editing any last things before it gets copied and pasted into Tumblr! I title it, find a gif, add some final details like the another's note, and then finally posted.

Now wait, you can make that easier!

I know, I really do. I just like the way I write. It's convenient for how my life works. Now I'm not saying anyone else should write this way or not write this way. You do what works best for you! I also like how I have multiple drafts in different places because I've almost lost or deleted things a few times.

So, wait, you're not posting multiple times a day?

Nope, sorry to anyone who loved the near constant flow of material to read. I have spent every free moment writing, and at first, I thought I had plenty of little things in my phone notepad to post. I was kinda wrong. I do, but not if I still want to create and write more. I currently have a ton of things thar are finished or almost finished. That just needs to be edited.

Editing is actually, like I said, a little harder because I do it at my desktop, meaning I have to be at my desktop to do it. This means I have to stop doing farm chores to do it, which is usually the end of the day.

So you post once a day? When?

Usually, once a day, if more than that means I wasn't as busy and had time to post, edit, or write. I usually post at different times, mainly later in the evening (EST).

I will be doing more votes to see what you want to see next! I love to make sure anything I post is what you guys want to see more of! I will say I have plans to post a few bonus Laswell and Farah things that will all be x!fem reader because I have been posting a lot of Valeria. Who I love to write for don't get me wrong, but I wanna make sure I have plenty of posts for all three of them.

I currently like to make sure I have the next part or the next few parts written or planned out so that if I can't write or fall behind, you guys still have the next part no matter what!

Thank you for every like, repost, comment, everything! It means a lot to me, and it honestly motivates me to write. I promise I see you all liking and commenting, and I deeply appreciate it!

Now, let's get back to your regularly scheduled program!

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writingdotcoffee · 4 years

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This was a tough edit 😵. The final piece ended up being only 522 words. It took two hours and I basically rewrote it three times over.

I really appreciate this feature because it captures the real work that goes into a difficult rewrite. I used to only track first-draft words which can be really deceptive. Sometimes, the first draft sucks, and all the heavy lifting happens during revision.

When I was editing my book, I had weeks when I felt like I wasn’t doing anything because I was stuck fixing up the absolute worst chapters. Wish I had Writing Analytics back then!

#writing #writers #write #writing tips #writing analytics #editors #revision

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asterkiss · 6 years

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For those who’ve read my oneshot Once Upon A Dream, I said I rewrote the ending a handful of times. Here’s an earlier and unfinished draft of the ending where Bill wasn’t so bad and where Mabel wasn’t placed under a ‘glamour’ spell.

Ah, what could have been.

The next night, they shared a conversation which she could remember.

“What would you do,” he asked, tone casual as they shared a gondola ride on the Grand Canal in Venice, “if I told you I was a demon?”

She blinked at the very odd and abrupt question, letting out a short laugh. “What sort of question is that?”

He smiled, eyes glittering in the sunlight. “Humour me.”

“Pssht, okay.” Rolling her eyes, she gave a shrug. “What kind of demon are we talking? Because some are pretty but then there are others that look like they climbed out of the Black Lagoon. Gross.”

“How about,” he replied, “a demon that invades the dreams of unsuspecting girls and slowly saps their life force away from them?”

Mabel’s smile dimmed somewhat at his rather precise response. This dream date – and suddenly she was aware she was in a dream – was getting a bit off topic. “Hah… What is this, some weird sort of hypothetical question?”

“Yes,” he affirmed, meeting her eyes, “in the way that I am exactly that and this is my way of telling you.”

Mabel swallowed, feeling uncomfortable. Now that she was aware she was dreaming, she could recall the alarm she’d experienced yesterday after waking to find a hickey upon her throat. Tying that in with what he was now telling her caused a heavy weight to settle in her stomach and she suddenly wasn’t enjoying this date very much. She looked out across the water toward the shore in a hope that they could dock and she could escape but suddenly there was no shore or dock. There was no Venice. They were in the middle of an ocean of black water that stretched on endlessly in all directions.

Mabel took this change in with mounting panic before she snapped her head around toward the back of the boat where the gondolier had been. Instead of an Italian man in a striped shirt, there was now a shapeless shifting lump of black slime the same colour as the water below.

She screamed and jumped up.

Her date blinked. “Be careful, you’ll rock the boat and-“

She tripped over the side and tumbled backwards with a splash.

“-fall,” he finished. “Ah.”

The water was the same consistency as the slime on the rowboat, and as much as she fought to break the surface, Mabel found herself sinking lower and lower into the abyss. Terror seized her heart and clenched it tightly as she opened her mouth and screamed-

-and woke to her brother shaking her shoulders.

“Mabel you- are you awake? It’s okay- it’s alright, it was just a dream!”

Breathing heavily, she stared up at him as he hovered over her, her chest heaving with each laboured breath.

“Dipper?” she whispered, voice cracking.

He smiled down at her, concern clear in his eyes. “I’m here.”

She threw her arms around him as she enveloped him in her arms, clinging to him as if he was the only one who could tether her down and away from that plane of nightmares.

She could remember everything. Every word spoken and every detail of his face and body, from his perfectly black leather shoes all the way up to every thread of hair like golden silk.

How ironic it was that the first time she remembered was the time she wanted to forget.

“What do you mean, you’re being a haunted by a demon?”

“It means what it means!” she snapped, currently seated on the couch in the shack with a blanket wrapped around her form and a mug of hot chocolate placed in her lap. “For weeks now I’ve been hanging out with a handsome stranger in my dreams! Last night he told me he was a demon sucking my life force!”

Three pairs of eyes stared down at her.

“You don’t believe me,” she muttered, shoulders drooping.

“It’s not that we don’t believe you,” Stanford replied. “It’s just… I spent years researching oddities, Mabel. And in all my time of studying supernatural occurrences, never did I come across anything that couldn’t be explained through ordinary means.”

“Yeah. Remember when we were 12 and first came to Gravity Falls? We’d go exploring and think we’d found something like a lake monster or gnome, but then it’d turn out there was a logical explanation behind it all.”

She frowned, staring down into the contents of the drink. “But when I wake up, there’s physical traces left over from my dream.”

“Like what?” Stanley asked.

“Like-” She suddenly clamped her mouth shut, cheeks turning pink. “….It- It doesn’t matter what! Just know that it happened!”

It was as if some sort of spell had been broken since last night. Before, she’d lost all interest in anything aside from sleeping. But now that she knew just what her dream date was exactly, she wasn’t so keen on going back to dreamland.

Noting her negative mood, Stanford suddenly perked up. “Ah! I’m sure I have a modified dream catcher somewhere from my younger years. It should serve to keep away any nightmares – and demons – from you whilst you sleep.”

“You think?”

Stanford nodded, plastering on a wide smile. “Of course!”

Mabel stared up at him for a long moment before breaking into a soft smile. “...Thank you, Grunkle Ford. For believing me.”

“Of course.” He smiled back at her.

As she dropped her gaze down to take another drink, Stanford’s smile faded and he exchanged a concerned look with the other two men. Not only was she sleeping almost all the time, but now she was having nightmares and paranoid delusions?

This wasn’t good.

Mabel tried not to fall back asleep.

Grunkle Ford had found his old dream catcher and placed it above her bed but even so, she was on edge. She tried to stay awake by busying herself with reading one of her young adult novels but she barely got a few pages in before the words began to swim across the page.

Her exhaustion won out in the end and the next thing she knew, she was standing on the Bow Bridge in Central Park, New York.

She gripped the bannister, staring down into the lake below with eyebrows pinched together. Unlike all the other times, she wasn’t under any delusions about this being reality. She knew this was a dream and she knew the footsteps approaching her could belong to only one.

When she turned her head, he was there. Coming to stand a few feet away from her, he leaned himself against the edge of the bridge and stared out across the park. All their other dates, she’d admired his appearance but never really taken anything in past his eyes. Now, standing here and able to look past the spell she’d been trapped in, she realised just how handsome he really was.

A yellow sweater was layered over a white collared shirt and accompanied by black pants and dark leather shoes. His hair was as golden as his eyes and looked as soft as silk, and for a moment she had the impulsive desire to run her hands through it before she quickly shoved the thought aside.

“Lovely weather we’re having,” he remarked, arms folded and resting upon the bannister. She frowned at his lackadaisical comment and said nothing. Her lack of response caused him to eventually look across toward her, and she made a point to avoid looking directly in his eyes. “What’s the matter? You don’t like it? I pulled this out of your mind, you know. All the other locations too. This place is number four on your list of places you’d like to be proposed too, right?”

She scowled at him. “What do you want? Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“This!” She gestured out to the park surrounding them with her arm. “You can’t just invade someone’s mind and dreams and give them the best dates of their life and- and- and....”

“And what?” He was smiling at her in amusement.

“And you just can’t!”

He rolled his eyes and turned to face her completely, looking almost bored. “I can and I have done. Not just to you. There’s been hundreds.”

Mabel blinked at that, and felt a pang of pain upon hearing those words.

“It’s how I survive,” he went on. “I’m a demon. An incubus. Are you familiar with that term?”

She was. Her face heated up and he chuckled.

“Aah, so you are. Let me clear up for you what is fact and what is fiction, then.” She suddenly realised he’d grown closer and took a hasty step back in alarm. If he noticed, he didn’t comment. “My kind require and feed upon the life force of humans, aka you.” He shot her a smile. “The easiest way for us to obtain this is invade their dreams. By engaging in intimate relations, we’re able to feed off their energy. It doesn’t take much. Just one…

Single…

Touch.” His hand brushed against her cheek and she jerked back in alarm, unsure when he got so close once again.

He laughed at her reaction. “Things such as hand holding are fine but they aren’t really enough. It’s actions such as kissing and other, more intimate acts that give us the energy we need to sustain.”

She listened, each word like a further twist of a blade in her heart. “You used me,” she whispered. “You were just going out with me because I was some stupid meal for you.”

“Weren’t you using me too?”

She blinked at that. “Huh?”

“You didn’t think I was real, did you?” he asked, arching an eyebrow. “In your eyes, I was a figment of your imagination. You went along with it all – and even initiated things most of the time, might I remind you – because you were unhappy with your love life in the waking world, or should I say lack of it?”

Her face turned red, both from embarrassment and indignation.

“We both used one another,” he stated.

“It’s not the same thing.”

“How is it not?”

“Because I didn’t think you had real feelings!” she shot back, eyes alight. She didn’t know he was real. She’d thought he was some perfect dream-boy her mind had conjured up.

He stared back at her.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” she asked when he didn’t reply. “Is this your way of making fun of me and laughing before you leave?”

“It should be.”

“What does that mean?”

He was still staring, and she was beginning to feel nervous under the intense scrutiny of his gaze. Still, she refused to look directly in his eyes.

“…You know, usually when I come across a meal, I’ll limit myself. I’ll visit once or twice for a few weeks and then that’s it.” He was walking towards her again but this time she didn’t move, holding her ground.

“But we’ve-“

“Met a lot more than that, haven’t we?” he cut in, flashing her a smile as he came to a stop directly in front of her. “That’s right. By now, with any other girl, I would have had my fill and moved on. But I haven’t, do you know why that is?”

She fidgeted under his gaze. “N-No… Why?”

His expression hardened and suddenly he was gripping her by the shoulders as he stared eye to eye with her. She sucked in a sharp breath, and tried to move back but his grip was iron-tight.

“No,” he said, voice tense and eyes wide. “I’m asking you why. Why is it that I can’t get enough of you? Who are you? What are you?”

“I-I don’t…”

His fingers dug into her shoulders and the scenery around them seemed to be melting away until the only thing that existed was them and this bridge in a black abyss. He was still staring at her with an imploring gaze, practically begging her to answer. In that moment she forgot her ire and anger, such emotions overshadowed by a sudden pity and empathy for the man stood before her.

He wanted her to set him free with an answer.

But she had nothing to give.

“I don’t know…” she replied eventually, voice soft. She wished she could answer him. She wished she could make it so he wasn’t looking at her like that.

But she couldn’t.

His expression crumpled, and she wondered for how long he’d been falling apart over the past weeks – how long had it been since their first date? Three weeks? Four? The days blurred together.

In the next instant his lips crashed against hers with such a force she stumbled back. Before she could even think of pulling away he retreated, hands still fastened to her shoulders as he dropped his head down in the space between them, staring at their feet.

“Why is it a simple human girl like you can make me lose all common sense?”

She didn’t know if he was waiting for an answer from her.

Their time together ended before she could think of a way to respond.

The next time she fell asleep, the demon was nowhere to be seen or found. Her dreams were left uninterrupted and her energy returned to her during the day. Both her family and friends were overjoyed when the ‘normal Mabel’ returned, and she apologised for her behaviour and the trouble she had caused.

She tried to move on and forget all about the demon.

But she couldn’t.

He may have ceased stepping into her dreams, but he continued to invade her every waking thoughts.

A flash of gold caught her eye whilst in town and she almost caught whiplash in turning towards it. In the end it was just a golden choker around a woman’s throat.

She should have been relieved that her dreams were demon-free.

…So why did it feel like there was an empty space where her heart should be?

#im going to delete the earlier word doc draft so im publishing this here so at least it's kept somewhere

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crisisoninfintefandoms · 6 years

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Hey, so guess who couldn’t sleep and ended up finishing the first draft of their Murder Husbands Big Bang entry?

Right, so I’m gonna send out the first tentative call for a Beta (I’ll probs post about it again laters, but just throwing it out there for now). I read that MHBB recommends a Beta and I don’t usually use one, and certainly never have in the Hannibal fandom, so I’m really not sure where to start lol.

I have used a Beta in another fandom, but I tend not to cause I get impatient and end up editing my own stuff a lot, so I’ll send a draft and by the time they get it back to me I’m like, “haha, yeah, I actually rewrote all that already, lol, but hey, you wanna look over this version now?” and they’re like, “...seriously? I just spent like three hours reading over a version that no longer exists?” And I’m just like “Sorry brah ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” (I promise to try not to do that this time btw).

Anyway, it came out just under 10,000 words at this point, it’s rated Explicit,and the theme in summary could best be described as “touch starved idiots+excessive water and mythological imagery,” so if you think you might be up for that, send me a message or something. And please be gentle because I’m terrified it just sucks and should scrap the whole thing which I just cannot do at this point ugh

#murder husbands big bang 2018 #very very first draft and still needs loads of work probably #but at least it's down now holy shit

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creativeprompts · 7 years

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How To Write An Awesome Movie, According To Some Of Hollywood’s Best Writers (Part 10)

Keep Writing. And Writing. And Writing

Linklater: I never quite give up. My movie Waking Life, I thought about for 20 years, even before I was a filmmaker. It was a subject matter that was interesting to me and I thought there was a story to be told within it, but it was the technological end that completed the puzzle for me, a new way to look. Like, Oh yeah, that story works if it works like that. It doesn’t work live action. So it took 20 years for me to realize that it needed a new format altogether to encompass it.

Feig: The biggest roadblock on any script is finishing the first draft. There are so many opportunities to quit. I have a file full of half-finished scripts from my past that I gave up on. The middle of a script is a perfect time to bail. When you start a script, you’re filled with energy and excitement. The first act is a blast because you’re setting everything up. Then, you head into the second act with a head of steam based on all the great ideas your first act set in motion.

But it’s as you’re still approaching the middle of the script that you start to flag. What if I didn’t set things up right? What if I’m heading in the wrong direction? What if everything that seemed so good is actually shit? You start to feel lost because you’re not even at the halfway point and you’re suddenly plagued with doubts. And then you do what I think is usually a pretty bad idea — you have someone read what you’ve written so far.

I’m not saying it’s always a bad idea to do this. I’ve had it work on the occasions my wife ends up really liking what I did up to that point. But I also think it’s an energy suck, a way to break your writing rhythm and basically procrastinate while you wait for feedback. (My rule when I’m writing is five pages a day, no matter what.) And if whoever’s reading your pages doesn’t wax poetic over how great they are, you are in serious danger of getting demoralized and setting the script aside.

I say just blast through a first draft. Once you pass that halfway point, you start to get that downhill momentum. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I find that once I hit Act 3, I sometimes finish the rest of the script in a day or two. The best thing that ever happened to me as a writer was realizing that these fears and insecurities are standard issue and that I’m going to go through them every single time I write a script.

Holofcener: I remember doing a very drastic draft [of Enough Said] at one point, I remember I went to a motel and I went through the whole script and I rewrote so much of it in like two or three days, and thinking OK, I solved this problem. And then I remember giving it a week before I read it again, and it was just terrible, like I threw out the new stuff. And that doesn’t happen that often. It’s probably toward the middle of the second act where you realize you have nothing to say and this movie is going nowhere. That’s usually what happens, and I think that’s what happened there, too.

You just take a nap, a lot of naps, right? A glass of wine, naps, avoid working, leave your house. It’s when I’m writing, my mood in my life is so dependent on how the script is going and how I feel about myself. If I feel like I know what I’m doing, then I feel good about myself. If the script is a mess, and I don’t even want to pick it back up, I feel like such a failure.

Johnson: The Barton Fink edition of writer’s block, I’ve never encountered that, or maybe I’m just lazier than Barton Fink. If I hit a block, I just go to the movies. Basically I find stepping away from it for a day or two, it might be a little frustrating to think that, Oh I’m not making progress today, I find that stepping away and kind of recharging your brain by thinking about something else always solves the problem. Although, I guess the caveat is that again, I’m always writing my own stuff, I’m never under a deadline to finish one specific thing and that sounds horrifying to me, and that I can picture driving myself in that situation, and I’m lucky I guess that I don’t have to do that.

Feig: For years, my poor wife has had to listen to me fall apart around the midpoint of a script and say things like, “I think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written” and “I think it’s all wrong” and mope and sigh around the house. It’s why I now try to go hole up in my NYC apartment when I’m in the second act. It’s like the Wolfman locking himself in a closet when there’s a full moon — you know the beast is going to come out and so it’s best to make sure the rest of the world is safe from it. Or at least not annoyed by it.

Johnson: The thing I’m writing now, I’m finally actually getting into writing it out, but I had the idea a year ago. So it’s been a year of having this thing in my head and letting it grow I guess. I was about to say it’s a nice luxury to have but it isn’t. But the truth is it isn’t because I want to be making movies quicker, I want to be doing these things quicker; so my answer is I do it wrong and please don’t tell anyone they should imitate the way I do it.

Source: Buzzfeed

#writing resource #screenwriting tips

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betweenstardustandsand · 7 years

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“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

if I don’t put writing here then the “Read more” cut doesn’t show up and I don’t want to force people to read my self-indulgent rambles

The first time I ever truly considered killing myself was when I was 13 going on 14.

The last time I wanted to kill myself was spring 2016, around March-April.

7 years I’ve struggled with these thoughts, and usually every 3-4 months I have serious thoughts about going through with it.

I started working on Legend the summer before I entered college. Then freshman year hit me with all the newness of classes and badminton and college life and I put the manuscript away until summer came around again. By now I realized that the premise of the story was inherently flawed, and I tried revising again--only to give up when I realized just how much of an overhaul it needed.

So away it went for another year or so until the summer after sophomore year rolled around. My then-boyfriend moved away for work and I was working in a lab at my university, so I had plenty of time to myself again. And as it usually is when I find myself in situations like this, the itch to write came back. Not that it ever truly left, but this time it was back with a vengeance--stronger than ever.

So I pulled Legend out again and started thinking. I started off slowly, revising the story chapter by chapter. I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but I had some sort of outline, which helped guide me.

But the results still weren’t really what I had hoped for. And eventually I came to the painful conclusion that if I wanted to tell this story the best way it could be told, I would have to start over. Big time.

According to my chat records with my sister and then-boyfriend, I started redrafting Legend in earnest sometime around New Year’s 2016. (Which definitely doesn’t seem right to me, but that’s probably because I’ve spent so long with this manuscript that it feels like I’ve been working on it since the beginning of time.) And I don’t mean a few tweaks here and there--it started off that way, and then I started rewriting whole sections and then whole chapters and with each iteration it seemed that more and more of the original draft was being phased out. Eventually the middle and end were so different that I went back and threw out the first few chapters and completely rewrote them from scratch.

I went through about 5 drafts over the course of a year and finished rewriting Legend just before New Year’s 2017.

It’s funny when I look back on that year. After I got into the momentum of writing and redrafting and editing, I realize that since spring 2016 I have not felt depressed or seriously suicidal. No, when I look back on that time--I felt happy. It was the happiest I had ever been since that time at 13/14 when I first flirted with the idea of suicide.

And now I’m querying and the rejections are starting to flow in and the silence to the rest of my pending queries is terrible. But somehow, even though the rejections sting and the whole process seems long and agonizing...I still feel like this is the happiest I’ve been. And I realize that even if Legend ends up being shelved--which could happen if (a) no agent wants to rep it or (b) no publishers want to publish it--I definitely don’t regret the time I spent writing or rewriting it.

See, these characters have been with me a long time. They saw me through three relationships and three breakups, the last of which was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced emotionally. But even then it was okay, because along with my wonderful support system of friends and family, I also had Legend. And there’s something strangely empowering about being able to look at something you’ve crafted and refined and be like, “Yeah, I got dumped and my heart was steamrollered to near oblivion...but look at this! I wrote a fucking book! So I guess I can say I’m pretty awesome, right? It’ll be okay. I can get through this. I had enough grit to rewrite my shitty first draft into 5 slightly less shitty drafts. So I definitely have enough grit to get over a breakup.”

Writing saved my life. I would definitely not be as strong or hopeful as I am now if I didn’t have Legend. For the first time in a long time, I’m happy. And I’ve stayed happy up until now. Even with the rejections rolling in, I’m still happy. I mean, not HAPPY like “Oh boy, more rejections! May I have another?” but...I feel like it’s going to be okay. And when your default for so many years has been “life sucks and nothing matters and you are not okay and you will never be okay”....that’s really something.

So even if this project ends up being shelved, I’m so grateful that I got this far. It’s truly been a journey. My characters are alive now, at least on the pages, and even if others don’t get to meet them...in the end it’ll be okay. They were my passion, my project, my happy escape for so long. Legend was my anchor. And even if the publishing world doesn’t love them...I love them! And that’s enough for me.

(This is getting waaay too long so I’m going to split it into two posts. The next one will be specifically about what I learned from writing my first ever full-length novel.)

#for me #depression #writing #this turned into a damn essay #what can I say #I'm self-indulgent as fuck

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authorkahlanweir · 6 years

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Editing is HARD

Okay, guys, I’m here to set a new record straight:

Editing sucks. Editing is one of the suckiest of sucky things as a writer. It can just drain the LIFE out of you. And I am learning this the hard way, as I’m mulling through the first draft of my WIP. But, I’m learning a few things along the way that I hope you can all relate to:

1. It turns out, having an outline is SAVING me big time. I never used to outline before, but for my WIP I made one up, edited it once (meaning I completely rewrote it because my story idea changed half way through) and am now glancing through again. And guess what? I can see EXACTLY where I need to add materials, where all my new ideas can fit, and what needs to get cut out. It is turning out to be a HUGE life saver in this stage.

2. Reading my own work is making me appreciate my abilities more. Yes, some of the words I produced are... oh wow are they so bad. Little odd thing I’ve noticed, I tend to foreshadow the SHIT out of things, like to the point where I might as well come out and say “And then this happens.” It was so bad, I realized I’m going to have to delete a page and a half from TWO different chapters because they just COMPLETELY spoil the moment later on. However, there have DEFINITELY been lines that I’ve read through this slow and painful journey and realized, shit, I’m not NEARLY as bad at this as I tell myself I am.

3. Speaking on the slow and painful, let me tell you a thing: Editing. Takes. So. Much. Time. So, I am currently on break between semesters for college and I said to myself: Hey, let’s get the first ten chapters edited! It won’t be THAT hard, right? Wrong. SO wrong. I barely got through the first read through, and my book is only 250 pages. I’m staring at the page saying there’s so much to do, and reminding myself again and again that I have TIME. What’s important right now is making progress, not actually finishing it in three weeks.

There’s lots more to this, guys, but I’m just at the beginning of my journey and I wanted to share some of the high and low points, or just things I’ve noticed. Hopefully, some of you can relate and just feel glad someone else gets it. Everyone else, this is your fair warning when you hit this phase: if you’re about to start writing, HAVE AN OUTLINE. Reading your own work makes you feel dumb BUT LOOK FOR THE GEMS. And most importantly: TAKE YOUR TIME EDITING.

Stay strong guys. The road ahead is rocky but we’ll get through it. Slow and steady wins the race.

Keep writing, keep editing, keep going.

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