When I woke up this morning, I found in my inbox an email from my beta, JK. Attached were the edited versions of the last three chapters of Blood Bound. That means the second major round of editing, and about the third or fourth round of editing altogether. This is not the rough-around-the-edges Blood Bound I had, but a much smoother, much better version of the novel.
It’s been an interesting journey for me, for the year and a half since I started seriously writing. To say I have learned a lot would be one heck of an understatement. I’ve learned about writing and publishing, discovered books and authors I otherwise would not have heard about. And most importantly of all, I’ve made friends.
It’s not all been sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, of course. I never expected it to be easy but I never appreciated how much effort it actually takes to get out the 60-80k worth of words that tells a complete story and that actually makes sense. And even then it’s not perfect first draft. I have had to learn how to deal with concrit, and while not always easy I can handle it far better than I once did. And I have had to deal with people reacting poorly to the “V word” when they ask what I am writing about. Without hearing anything beyond that word, let alone actually reading anything I have written, I have had people call me “a[nother] hack” who’s “jumping on the [vampire] bandwagon”.
The other thing I learned since starting writing Blood Bound back in April of last year and was so totally not a really interesting form of exam study procrastination is that I was not going to churn out Blood Bound, edit it quickly, find myself an agent and ta da. After a while I started pinching myself whenever I had that daydream as it was distracting me from my actual work. And somewhere along the line, in these past few months, once JK got through with this current edit of Blood Bound I was going to set it aside in its little folder next to the other novel .odt files and leave it there for the moment. In the meantime I am going to finish working on Lionheart and then, post NaNo, The Circled Green. I’ll keep working on Bones and The Superhero Diaries too, even as my brain keeps adding new levels of complexity, characters and world-building to Blood Bound.
And then I’ll come back to it with more experienced eyes. I’ll add news scenes, rewrite some old ones and maybe even cut some others out. Maybe by then I’ll have an agent or even a book published. And maybe by then vampires will have swung back into “fashion” again. Who knows? The only thing I do know is that I am not giving up on this story, or the stories that follow after it.
So until then, thanks to everyone who has been supporting me. Thanks to JK, Seanne and Rebekah – you in particular are the ones who put up with my ramblings on almost a daily basis. Thanks to all those people who have commented on my blogs regularly, or semi-regularly. And even thank you to those people who stop by randomly, read the snippets of BB and others and comment on how much you loved it and say how it has to be published so you can read the rest right now. You don’t know how much that brightens my day to find a comment like that in my inbox.
Thanks for the memories, guys. This ride’s been fun – but it’s nowhere near finished yet.
