Step 1: Write a 5,000 word outline.
Step 2: Take three weeks using the outline to write a 75,000 word book.
Step 3: Take three months reading your own text and sharing with a few trusted folks to edit and revise the content.
Step 4: Agonize about the content, overburdening your psyche.
Step 5: Rewrite the one chapter you despise setting off a chain-reaction of plot inconsistencies.
Step 6: Spend considerable time assured that you've ruined the work and that it should find a dusty home with "the others".
Step 7: Consumed by the remorse a creative person feels having abandoned one of their children, revisit the work until you've fixed all the plot consistencies.
Step 8: Return to the version of the book written before you rewrote the chapter you hated. Y'know, the one that seems perfectly fine now, in the context of the unaltered plot that makes more sense having revisited the marvelous outline you wrote.
Step 9: Look for rogue and/or absent commas, punctuation and other minutia that 95% of the people who read the work won't notice are amiss.
Step 10: Gaze down upon the finished fictional work and wonder how the devil you're going to get it published and through whom.
Repeat.
The fact that you can do this to yourself over and over again is both upsetting and admirable!
ReplyDeleteArt, I'm in with a publisher in Minneapolis, Minnesota. If you're really interested in talking to a publisher instead of self-publishing.... they're small.... but I can find out if they might be accepting new work? Let me know.
I'd like to know more about the publisher. Maybe I could buy you a coffee and you could tell me about them?
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