This time of year is supposed to be filled with denouements, light revision, and reading. Ha! And perhaps, Bah Humbug.
For the second time in my publishing career, I had to scrap a book and start over with a new manuscript. The first one was Chowndie, which is still stuck at about 1/3rd complete. The second was Backyard Dragons. This book should have been an easy slam dunk for me to write. I know the characters, I had the concept already, I’d been chomping at the bit to get to it all through October. I wrote it in a little over a week, dove in for revisions over two weeks, and sent it to someone I paid to feedback for me so I could get it back quickly.
I was so confident about this book I hired a line editor in October for work in January, and set myself up to publish in time for FLYA, a young adult convention in mid-March I’ll be attending with Clockwork Dragon.
Long story short: it sucked big wampa butt. Over the past week, I feverishly rewrote the whole thing except the first chapter. Prologue? Ditched. Plot? Ditched. New side characters? Ditched. Approximately 62,000 words were murdered and dumped on the side of the road.
As a result, I had no time to read. This week, I’ve got two plane trips between now and Friday, and I can only write so much on a plane. There will be book reviews again in the near future!
It must have been hard to walk away from the manuscript after so much effort, but it shows to me that you have a professional attitude about your writing. I think that is commendable.
Accepting the feedback itself is the hard part, I think. Once that’s done, tossing the manuscript to start over is the easy part.