As you were able to read in my various posts throughout October, I quite enjoyed NaNoWriMo this year. It was refreshing to step away from my traditional Modern military novel and write something different. Now that I have a first draft, what follows next?
I have gone through this process before. After I completed Declipse, I spent a couple of months procrastinating the revisions. I was new to the process and didn’t know what to do. Now, I have learned that revisions are definitely the first thing that follows this stage of drafting.
Ernest Hemingway
Though Ernest Hemingway apparently had quite a busy life, in the literary world he is mostly remembered for one quote.
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
As his name is remembered through the generations for his literary contributions, he may have been on to something. Whether that is true or not, I already know what the state of my first draft is. I wrote A Cage of Horrors at high speed and in my second language. Even though I consider myself fluent in English, I know for certain that my draft is filled with errors.
My prose is filled with errors when I write in my native language. Even though I can type without looking at my screen, both spelling and grammar suffer when I write at speed. I will never forget the time I intended to write ‘in his hands’ and found out, during re-reading, that I wrote ‘in her pants’.
Classic.
This is, of course, just one of many examples. I want to spare the people who want to read my work these errors, so I intend to revise A Cage of Horrors first. As this is another tome of 30 chapters, I anticipate it will take a bit to get through it properly.
How long until the release follows?
It took me a long time to get to revising after writing Declipse: Revolutie. I don’t intend to let it lie until April, like I did with Declipse, but it will take a bit. I anticipate that revisions won’t start until January, maybe February. It’s all depending on the eventual progress I may have with publishing Declipse.
Regardless, the first release will be for friends, family, and colleagues. They get the Hemingway Draft and get to provide feedback. Only after that follows my decision of making it available to the public.
At the moment, I lean towards converting the file to an .epub and making it available for free. I’m not too certain that I’ll break through on the international market yet, so it can’t hurt to give something away for free. If anything, it will be a novelty, should that happen.
However, that will take a while.
Why so long?
I will wait so long with revision, because I want to give the story some time to recover. An important part of revision is re-reading everything you wrote. However, the more I recognize, the more I unconsciously skip. This means that I will skip over spelling and grammar errors, which will stay in the Hemingway Draft that way.
So, I need to let the story leave my mind. I need to let my attention move to other things, so I can rediscover myself.
Additionally, after that recovery, I need to read everything again. Just to put it in perspective, the story is roughly as long as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Picture courtesy of Amazon.com
Even though I enjoy reading and have been known to get lost in a book, that is still a lot of words to read. It is also a very different kind of reading, which changes my speed. In addition to reading, I am also correcting, reflecting, and making notes for my revisions.
All of that besides a full-time day job.
In other words, if I check a chapter per day, I’m doing well. After that follows correcting and revising. If I do a chapter or two of that per day, it’s a good tempo. These things add up.
Add to that a social life and things to do besides the revising, and we’re already looking at months of work.
And then the release follows.
It’s only expected that I announce the release of A Cage of Horrors to everyone who wants to read it. I will likely upload it to this very website, even!
A new page will be made, providing a summary and overview. I may even commission some art, who knows.
Time will tell.
