It's Good To Be Back
/Well, it has been a while, I have to say. The Army tends to make me do things that have the potential to keep me away from a computer for extended periods of time. Not that it is a bad thing by any means; nevertheless it’s good to be back.
I can’t say that it was a complete loss, being gone. In the two weeks I spent in Texas I was able to get back several of the beta reads that I sent out, so that was awesome. It seems as though the editing process is going to go on forever, but I know that once I get that feeling, it will be done. At this point I am not sure if that feeling is going to be one where I am completely satisfied with my work, or a feeling of “I can’t read this again.”
You see, the whole point in writing a book, for me, is to get it into the hands of my readers. At some point I am going to have to stop moving commas and periods and just get on with it. If grammar bothers someone so much that they can’t read a story for what it is, then should they really be reading it?
I started the Pearls of Solus series back in 2010. Don’t worry, I haven’t been writing on it that long. The majority of the writing has happened in the past year, but the beginning of it all was back in 2010. I remember not even planning to write it. I just had a thought one day and began to write it down. That thought became a chapter, and then two, and then three; three absolutely horribly written chapters. When I begin to feel as though my writing is not up to par, I always pull up those early drafts and begin to read just to see just how far I have come.
Work, family, school, you name it and it was going on back then. It is still happening. I now have three wild children and work has obviously not changed, but something has. Maybe it was my motivation, or maybe I will never know. The bottom line is that one day in early 2017 I pulled up that old story I had started and began writing it again. It is now a complete story and is hovering around 72,000 words. When I think of the fact that the longest thing I have written was my parenting book, A Father’s Guide, coming in at around 22,000, then the magnitude of what I have done begins to come into reality.
I have spent so much time wanting to make it perfect and hoping that every single person in the world loves it. The truth of the matter is that it will never happen. There will always be that one person who doesn’t like fantasy or that grammar Nazi who just can’t go on because the period was in the wrong place. I have seen so much with sending out beta reads. I have had someone not make it past the first couple of paragraphs. I have also had someone read the entirety of the book in a week and absolutely love it, and are impatiently waiting for the next one.
I will never be able to please everyone, and I feel like that was something I had to figure out by myself. It was so stressful before I actually had people read my novel. But now I am able to see just how different everyone is, and I think that is so awesome. It won’t be long now, and whether you hate it or love it, it is going to happen and I couldn’t be more excited about it.