I'm not sure why, maybe I just have this enlarged fear that if I slow down, or don't try hard enough, my life will run away from me and I'll wake up one morning at like sixty years old and realize that my life was a waste and I never impacted the world or anyone in it.
But...the problem is galloping: especially in how I wrote and sometimes still do. It's the biggest guarantee that publishers will reject your submissions and half the time not even tell you why.
It's like with the first copy of The Beginning of an End (and you can find a link to a page that shows some of the pages of the self-published version, here):
Self-Published First Novel
But if you do take a moment to look at the book and how it was compared to the version I've been posting on this blog, you'll see that there's been some improvements. My point is that if you really want to get properly published and for people to want to look at your work and not chuck it away (and I'm still yet to reach this stage), then really the main idea is that you need to go over your book, every word and phrase and instance of spelling until you can hardly bare the sight of a word any longer, and you know the words to your book, or the very least the sequence of events in your novel so well that you can explain it with your eyes closed.
A bit insane? Well, yes. I also think it's all about motivation and having confidence in yourself and your ability but at the same time always believing that you could and should improve and receive advice.
When I started re-editing my first book, I was determined to take it all one step at a time. I even drew up a graph that showed the detailed steps of my plan that would eventually end with full publication.
Step One: Basic Re-write of manuscript
Two: Second Re-Vision
Three: Second Opinion (aka, as many other eyes as possible to view and edit your work)
Four: Re-Edit
Five: Final Edit
Six: Final look-over
- Repeat these steps for your cover letter and author biography.
- Even after all this you should still be going over your work looking for anything you've missed. Face what your problems are in your writing and try hard to fix them. It's also a really good idea to do character biographies and try and find any holes in the plot or clichés.
- Make copies of your work, endless back-up. Print the final copy, as well as keeping it on your computer, on your hardrive and USB and even the old floppy disk or information CD is a must.
- Find every publisher and company everywhere in the world that publishers work in the genre of your novel, and make them want to read your book and publish it. Sell yourself as well, because often the author needs to be as trendy as the current climate in book-genre. Go overseas if need be and don't give up, if you've been shown and told and know in your heart that your book is good and worth something, then someone has to publish you eventually.
It's not so good though, too much of that negative talk, so I got to actually taping motivational messages on the side of my computer.
The most important ones: You are a good writer. One Step at a time. Don't gallop.
But as I've said before we'll do anything to procrastinate, but really it's all just in our head and what needs to be done is to just write, even if you're incredibly bored or in a funk. (Though be wary of the boredom thing). Probably the hardest thing we can ever experience is when we lose interest in our own writing. That happened with one of my books, in that I and a friend I have (who...is a a published author), were super-editing one of my novel's to send into the competition, and the novel was too short.
It's strange because the story still ended up being great, but the second half I wrote, I wrote without any desire to write it. It just...wasn't in me. But I did it, and well it's still not published but hey, maybe soon.
It really is incredible though, the writing bug. It makes us previously-sane people step onto the path that is near-impossible to get off. We want the simplest thing, to see our creation in print with a version of our name on the cover, to be able to hold it, and yet the world can often make that simple thing the hardest to accomplish. Yet even when we are rejected endless times, we still doggedly keep at it.
We must keep at it. The main points that keep me going, is that I cannot let myself think that there's no point in writing because I can't see when in my future I'll ever be published. To write as though it is your only career, well that is challenging to a degree. It also makes no sense to me that others and myself have written all these books that have embedded themselves in our hearts and that they are not meant to be published.
Where is the justice in that?
So we keep trying, and keep writing.
Just one last thing dear friends before I stop jabbering away to you. This has all stemmed (the topic of this blog today), because I recently got feedback from a competition I entered eight months ago. 'Grace Notes Publishing'. It's a really good idea, in that it's one of the only competitions I've come across where the judges give you feedback and then give you the opportunity to re-submit it to them as a revised copy.
Only problem was that the book I sent to them wasn't that well edited or finished, I was galloping when I submitted it.
It wasn't an altogether bad review, but I think it needs tonnes of work (the book that is). The part of the critique I actually found funny was this line:
...over use of clichés,
and a style that seems to want to be pedantic but can’t quite manage it.
But enough said, and I have decided to sink into oblivion until the part of my grand scheme that focusses on finding publishers is ready to be put into effect, then I shall work to submit my novel as though there was nothing else left to me.
If my previous-unpublished self could not get published then perhaps C.L.Scarlett can.
Much love Little Lanternas,
Miss CLScarlett xx
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