Finished Manuscript of Seeking Light Aurora !!!

I finished! I think it was over a year ago when I first thought about the idea of this story. It originally started out as a short story, intended to be entry into a writing contest. After I sketched it out, and wrote the first paragraph, I scrapped it and quit writing for several months. I didn't think I had what it takes to be a writer. 

Flash forward to last month and I read a book called I Could do Anything if I Only Knew What it Was. This book was phenomenal. It helped me deal with some of the many issues related to writing, building a writing career and life in general - especially dealing with my past.

Once I got my mentality properly adjusted, and realized [decided] that I really did want to write as a vocation - and hopefully my career [professionally, i.e. get paid to do it] - I set to work and completed the summary outline for Our Daughter. Then I shelved it to get some space and worked up the summary for Seeking Light Aurora. I became so enamored with the characters in this story that I decided to write it before Our Daughter. 

It wasn't until I was about forty pages into it that I realized it was not a very long story - definitely not typical novel length. I, of course, started to worry, running that tape in my head, "You're not good enough. You can't even write a full length book. You'll never make it work. You might as well give up."

I didn't give up, though. I did a little research on novellas and discovered they work in perfectly with writing larger books. It can be used as a free give-away, it can be sold alongside other, novel length titles, etc. It can even be incorporated with several other novellas and published as a collection. It's perfect, because I really didn't want to try and add more scenes [padding] to the story line. I really like it the way it is. 

I also found out that it is best to wait on running any big marketing campaigns until I have at last four books in print and ready for public consumption. This way there are several available titles for readers to buy and read while I have new titles in the works. 

But, as for Seeking Light Aurora, she is going to bed. I have set a tentative date to pull the manuscript back out in two weeks and start editing. In the mean time, I'm going to take a few days off from active writing and try to catch up on some items on my task list. I'm also going to focus my efforts on editing The Preparation, which I think I will need to then run it though White Smoke, then another edit. I did discover [via several blog articles] how to pre-process a manuscript for editing by find/replace with formatting for trouble words, like -ly's and then and that and my dreaded ." instead of ," . I now have a whole list of words that I go through and highlight in the text before I ever begin. It really makes them stand out and it will make it much easier to tell I'm making progress. I also found a edit hack blog, though I think they have stopped updating it.  

I also want to focus some significant time on reading/working through the grammar/English/writing books I have, and also the software and exercises available online. My goal is to hack my writing process to the point that I am producing much better work exponentially rather than sequentially or worse, remain flat-lined in my growth as a writer. I'm really starting to embrace the idea of developing my craft as a writer and also I think I might actually enjoy the marketing aspects online. It's just the face to face interaction I never could stomach. 

At any rate, here's to trying.