Good evening all,
I am using the fact that I have gotten through editing the first third of the rough draft of my second book ‘And the Sun Burned Red’ to write another little update on what I am working on and the process of writing. On the one hand, I have spent more time writing, or at least editing, in the last couple months than I consistently have in the last few years, which is definitely progress for me. It also feels good to be tackling and working through my second book, which I am finding more smoothly written than the rough draft of my first book. In part this is because I had already worked on several drafts of ‘The Shadow of the Past’ before I put a single word to paper of ‘And the Sun Burned Red’ and partially because unlike ‘Shadow’, which was rough drafted over several years, ‘Sun’ was drafted in a single November (in 2012, but I digress) which creates a more unified draft.
While I am satisfied both with the progress that I have made in general, and with the fact that ‘And the Sun Burned Red’ requires for less work than ‘Shadow’, I am running into two particular problems.
1. Working on ‘And the Sun Burned Red’ is what I have chosen to focus my time on, but any work I do on that book also represents, to a degree, procrastination from working on the second edition of ‘Shadow of the Past’. A few months ago I finally finished an updated draft of the book, making a few edits and clearing up some issues with the first edition. I have also done a grammar check on the work and have cleaned up some of the typos and other issues that were present in the first draft. What remains for me to do is format the document to be optimally rendered in both paperback and Kindle editions of the book. I am only partly through this process and have hit the tedium of formatting which I am having trouble focusing on enough to get done.
The truth is that I really need to make myself get finished with that process so that I can look at commissioning an artist to create a more unique and interesting cover for the book. Once that is done I will upload the second edition of the book on Amazon, and in all likely will call that a work finished and not revisit it again. I am proud of the achievement of having published in the first place, and once the second edition is available I will likely look at doing at least a little advertising for the work to try and get some sales and interest.
2. The second issue is that, while I am currently sailing on contentment of working on editing a work that I am, so far, finding quite satisfying and refreshing, I am shortly to run into the difficulty of the fact that the rough draft of ‘And the Sun Burned Red’ was only half completed. I have the entire books outlined but my rough draft in 2012 only got halfway through actually writing it. I am both exhilarated and terrified at this prospect. I am exhilarated because it has been, truly, far too long since I have actually been writing and creating new material, and I am terrified that my bad habit of procrastination will rear its ugly head and I will find some reason or excuse to hold of doing that, either by falling away from writing altogether or moving on to a new project instead of finishing this old one. Hopefully that will not be an issue, I have learned a lot of lessons from ‘The Shadow of the Past’ and I hope that me getting back into doing work will continue from here.
Anyway, long story short, I have hit a milestone in what I am working on and I wanted to talk a little bit about my writing process and am currently working on.
As always, below is a link to ‘The Shadow of the Past’ if anyone is interested in learning more. Any comments or shares are greatly appreciated.
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