SStevenSmith.com

Looking to thwart the progress on your new novel?  I would suggest that you live in 3 different places in the same year.  That was my unexpected experience in 2017.  My wife and I had intended to live in our newly rented apartment for at least a year before we started looking for a new home to buy, but a very noisy bar down the street and neighbors above us who must have had feet the size of the Flintstones changed our minds.  When we found the perfect little house, emphasis on the little, that we could actually afford, we made our move.

This was our second move in a year, and the third place we’d call home in that year, as well, but it was worth the effort.  The rehabbers who fixed up the place did a pretty good job in most parts of the home, but cut a few corners in other ways that weren’t too bad, but did require us to make some changes.  Being an older home, it had some things we just had to get fixed like the lack of ground wiring on our electrical sockets, and an oddly placed electrical panel that would have been blocked by the washer.  I left that to a professional, but took on other projects, like creating 13 window screens which were MIA when we bought the place.  Multiple other projects also ensued for a base level conversion to make it our little place.

On this last move I secured my first novel draft with much more dignity, having learned from my last mistake, and have recently found some time to continue the rewrite.  With all of our must do home projects done, I delved back into the “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” novel and found, to my surprise, that I’m very close to it being done.  I expect to have this completed by the end of next month.  A dangerous thing to say publicly, considering the amount of time this has taken me, but writing a novel is quite a lot of work.  I work hard in other areas of my life so this has been a bit of a balancing act.  Unfortunately, the novel has had to be prioritized down the list, at times, given it’s more of a dream of mine that isn’t producing any cash flow, as of yet.

After the final push this month, I’ll need to quickly immerse myself into the business of self-publishing and promotion.  I’d done some research before, but need to firm up my plan of action.  I’ll blog more on this as I get into the process as the information I’m finding is all over the place.  Amazon has good information on the technical process of bringing your book to life on their platform, but little on the other aspects of the journey.  Questions still abound as to how I structure the business aspect.  I found a good book on the promotion part and think I also found a good book cover, but there is still much to decide and act upon.  More to follow soon, as I’m determined to finish my first novel so I can start writing the next one I already have planned.

With no more home moves planned for at least the next ten years, I’ll have more time to work on this life goal of mine.

Progress Report:
“Burt’s Bots” Novel Outline progress:
Outline:  17.816 words  (Added more notes to the outline)
Novel 1st Draft:  13,367 (Went back to outlining 1st though)

“Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” Novel Progress:
1st Draft Novel:  78,198 words
2nd Draft Novel Rewrite: Up to page #320 of 351

Unfortunately, my blog about completing my first novel is going off topic again as a big life change has delayed my final edit of “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.”  I hate that so many of my recent posts have been on why I’m not working on the novel, but selling our condo and finding a new place to live has been a major life event to deal with.  My wife and I have basically been flipping our own condo, updating hardware, paint, flooring, HVAC, etc., and that alone was a tremendous amount of back-breaking work.  We gave about a third of what we owned to charity, and put another third in storage, in order to give our place a very light and airy feeling.  At one point, while moving a massive amount of boxes to storage, we came back and found that we’d left one lone box on the side of the building courtyard, completely exposed to anyone walking by.  To my horror, I looked and found it was labeled as containing my second draft novel!  Needless to say, my heart sank as that became a metaphor for how I’ve been neglecting it lately.  Thankfully, it had not been disturbed and I quickly secured it under lock and key until the moment I can move it to our new place and get back to work.

The next stage to come was the staging and selling process, which was also involved.  Those who have sold their properties know what it’s like to live an unnaturally perfectly clean lifestyle, knowing at any minute, someone may want to check out your home. Thankfully it all worked out well as we got multiple offers and settled on one of them.  Now, since we accepted an offer, it’s all about the moving process.  Complicated by staging furniture we’ll give away and new furniture we’ll buy,.. there’s still a lot on my plate.

My life is currently one big checklist of things to do, get and complete to make this move happen.  And my special box with my 2nd draft novel waits for me to get this move done and unpack it.  I believe I marked it with a very big star, so finding it among the thirty or so boxes should be easy,…right?

God willing, my next post will be about how productive a writer I’ve become from our new home.

No Progress:   🙁
“Burt’s Bots” Novel progress at Camp NaNoWriMo:
Outline:  17.816 words
Novel 1st Draft:  13,367 (Went back to outlining 1st though)

“Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” Novel Progress:
1st Draft Novel:  78,198 words
2nd Draft Novel Rewrite: Up to page #213 of 351

Well in my case, it’s really a bit of both.  I think I outlined well enough that I don’t have massive issues  to work on, but scenes will be changed and disappearing character’s will be fixed, but much of everything else is polishing.   Sure, I’ve found my fair share of spelling and grammatical errors, and I am having to fix sections that repeat scenes or have other conflicting information, but progress is good and I can see the end is still a ways down the road, but definitely approaching.

As with most of my novel writing journey, I don’t really know if my techniques are the best, but they appear to work for me.  I did a read of my novel with a red pen on hand, and made notes on parts that didn’t make sense, or where facts changed from a previous chapter.  The red ink did flow for spelling errors as well, but thanks to my Scrivener’s program spell checker, it wasn’t too awful.  My lovely wife was kind enough to have gone through a read of my first draft as well and made her own notes of questions, observations and spelling errors so that helped a lot too.  Thankfully she liked the novel as well, but she is a little biased so my ego’s not swelling up too big.  Still wonderful to me to have satisfied my first reader, particularly this one.

So my method now is to take my first draft novel with red pen marked edits and do the physical rewrite in my Scrivener program.  It’s a little disjointed a process though as I do a quick look at the papers with edit notes, then go at it in Scrivener, but I inevitably get ahead of my marked papers in the program itself.  Then I go back to make sure I didn’t miss any of my previously marked issues.  Thankfully, I haven’t found many issues I didn’t catch a second time, but I did find just a few that I didn’t catch on the first.  Guess that’s really part of the process, but I hope it ends up in a well edited novel with as few mistakes as I can possibly manage.

Considering that people will be paying for my humble little novel, I think I owe it to them to do the best I can to make it as readable as possible, as well as what I hope will be an entertaining story.  I’ve been looking into hiring a professional proofreader for a final check, but the costs can be in the $1,000 level and up, so I’ll probably not go that route because that’s a pretty big investment to make for a first novel.

I think it would pain me very much to read reviews that indicated they found a lot of errors in the words I’d put down on paper.  I don’t want to go the analysis paralysis route either, though, so at some point soon, I’ll be making my last skim over everything and making the final push to get it published.  In my day job position, this will entail my “coming out” with my novelist aspirations as I’m required to notify my employer of any outside business activity, and selling books, no matter how few (or hopefully many) fits into this definition.

So after all this time, working on this first novel of mine, I’m getting very close to publishing it on Kindle and other platforms.  I’m hoping the rest of the rewrite goes well, and I get closer to the ultimate goal.  Partly because I want to see “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” live, and that won’t happen until it’s published.  Another part, though, wants to finish this story, so I can move on to the next one.  Almost there.

Novel: Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.
1st Draft Rewrite Progress:  Up to Page 72 of 351 (double space proof copy print)

Finishing the First Draft!

I FINISHED MY 1ST DRAFT!  The last chapter has been written and I’ve finally finished this fairly large body or work and gotten my story out.  I had a great push in this last month thanks to the accountability of my Camp Nanowrimo experience.  This nonprofit website was create in a Spring Camp style and participants were grouped in cabins per the camp theme.  Most of my cabin mates had the same kind of 30,000 word count goals similar to mine. Well actually my estimate was just over 31 thousand words to complete my novel but I came up about 6 thousand words short of my projected end point.

This Camp Nanowrimo experience began on April 1st and with every writing session you were to post your word count totals.  I must admit that it really energized and standardized my writing efforts.  Since this was all being done part time, it’s taken me some time to get this done, but the camp helped me to get into the daily writing habit.  I had a great desire to keep my word counts up.  I was no longer writing all by myself, with no accountability.  I suddenly had peers, also with their own writing goals, whose progress I could see and whom I showed my progress to as well.  This was very motivating and really encouraged me to write often.  It’s a different experience when you are working in tandem with other aspiring writers, also working hard on their own stories. 

The site had a message board where each cabin member could leave comments on their progress, and often encouragement to others as well.  It was a really great experience and really helped me to make that final push to complete the first draft.  They have a more famous event in November where they challenge writers to complete their 50,000 word novel in that month alone.  I plan to take up that challenge with a new book idea that’s been percolating in my head, but that means I have to get busy on the next phase of this 1st novel,.. the rewrite!

While it’s a sweet victory to celebrate the completion of my novel’s first draft, like any other work, it’s going to need rewriting, polishing and editing.  This process promises to be easier than the first, but it’s still going to be a substantial amount of work.  This will be the phase where I’ll no doubt find multiple flaws and misspellings as well as intended elements I left out entirely, or repeated more than once.  The document I have now is definitely not ready for prime time for sure, but it’s my story, created out of thin air, and now out of my head.  Now comes the refining of what I’ve done.  Now comes the crafting of this story into a novel that I pray people will enjoy.

Your prayers are still welcomed as I enter this new phase of writing.  I’ll take a very short break and then will start by reading what I’ve created. Prior to this, I’ll finish reading a good book on the rewriting process so as to hopefully provide some useful times.  But for now, a minor celebration for my wife and I, and my thanks to God for helping me get to this point.

April 25th, 2015:
Current Novel Word Count:   78,198 Words
Percentage towards 1st Draft Goal:  100%
Title: Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.