My first ever completed manuscript, how you felt about it then and now.
I started to get the idea of becoming a writer at 29. It was about eleven years ago.
My mother told me that I was thirteen when I said to her that I want to become a writer. I completely forgot about that, and I kid you not when she asked me then what my surname was going to be, I told her Woods. It's incredible how things stuck in the back of our sub-conscience for so long and become part of our decisions when we make them.
Jumping forward again to my twenty-nine-year-old self. Firebolt was my first completed manuscript. Although I didn't get an agent for it, I got a publisher. My experience with the said publisher was terrific at the beginning. Still, as the year progressed, it became a nightmare, but this is not what this blog post is about.
My blog post is about my first manuscript, called Firebolt.
It took me three years, yip, three whole years to write it. I've learned the most about writing with this baby as I struggled to put my words and what was in my head on paper. And let me tell you, I still struggle to get everything in my head, on paper. (after eleven years - hahaha)
Firebolt started out well over a 400-page book, but then I joined a writing community and took that first step all authors fear to take, get others to critique.
It was a slow process, and although I loved, loved my first completed manuscript, my critiquers said that I had to cut a lot of things that became tedious.
So I started to hack away at my manuscript to make it concise and neat, but little did I know that I hurt my characters' most essential parts.
It took me quite a few years to discover it through numerous reviews. And it's something that authors, especially new authors, need to be very careful of.
It might be a cleaner copy but make sure that it doesn't hurt your character development in the process and their relationships.
My first draft wasn't the final draft at the end, and I still regretted it so much to this day that I cut and hacked away instead of just cleaning up my sentences. That way, I could've kept the character building and the critical part of why they were a couple and not hurt my characters.
It's still a gem of a book with almost 1000 reviews on Amazon. I'm thinking of taking my first draft and doing something magical with it for the tenth anniversary. Who knows...
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