Happy Monday y'all! We are in a new month, which is CRAZY. This week is HECTIC to say the least. I have a newsletter going out this Wednesday, hopefully you're signed up so you don't miss any of the fun. Anddd if you aren't signed up yet, why not??
This past weekend I prepared The Fall Changes to go to ARCs, which means we are on the last step before it goes LIVE next week! Ah!! I'm so excited to release my second novel and the first of the Honey Cove series!
Anyway..... I wanted to talk to you all about how many drafts an author generally goes through. Some you may not even realize.
So let's go through them using The Fall Changes.
The infamous first draft. This was literally me puking words onto the page to get the story out there. It was terrible. It was awful. It had no sense of true paragraphs and formatting was off because it was my first manuscript. EVER!
My revised draft, a.k.a. draft two. This was where I applied changes from a friend's manuscript to mine. She had her story edited and well, let's just say I realized how OFF my manuscript really was. (This would have probably consisted of drafts 2-5 if we are being honest, but I only used one document, so I have no idea what the count would have been.
Next came the beta draft. I sent my lovely manuscript, as polished as I thought it could be, to betas. Which we discussed on another blog post. They sent me feedback about the novel and suggested changes. I gathered those ideas and suggestions and then dove into the next draft. Oh and did I mention it was here that I decided my third person POV would be better suited as first person POV? Yeah, that's right I changed the ENTIRE novel's POV. That took some time.
This draft was the one that had to go to the editor. I added all my revisions and beta feedback and polished it as much as possible. (My first novel came out before this was due and getting those edits back helped me know what I should fix grammatically and editorially as well).
Then my editor sent me feedback. I had to make my edits in the draft and this one I called the ARC draft. Where once it was pristine and perfect (and certainly not actually perfect but as perfect as my cross-eyed expression could handle) I sent it to ARCs.
For me, the ARC draft will be the final one, unless something crazy surfaced, but even so, this ONE story went through countless revisions. No author writes something one time and it gets posted to the world. It's a process and sometimes we forget that.
Check back this Friday for a DOUBLE review on YA baseball themed stories. Can't wait to read them and review!
Always,
Marie