Lessons Come

My first novel is in the hands of beta readers now. I edited it, handed it off to my editor, then fixed the millions of things she found. I learned so much from that process! Everything I’m doing now is so exciting. It’s all so new to me.

The first thing I learned is that my grammar was sub-par. Well, most of those mistakes are fixed now for my future work. I won’t mention specific mistakes, but they were pretty stupid. Next, having someone who really enjoys reading and talking about your art specifically is amazing. That’s the most priceless part of the entire editing process.

Ok, so lot’s of you probably know all this already, but this was my first novel. Poetry is different to me because I see it in the same way that I see improvised music. When I’m playing bass or guitar, I’m going with the flow. There’s no going back. That’s the same way I see poetry. Actually, I’m going to start streaming my poetry sessions on Twitch pretty soon. I want folks to see how magical it is. It didn’t hit me, how cool my poetry jams could be, until one of my youtube stream viewers made a comment like “Man, you’re just sitting there pumping out writing on the fly.”

To me, that’s what poetry writing has always been. Novel writing is brand new territory. Before 2017, I’d never written anything longer than ten thousand words. Last year, I wrote two novels, both over fifty thousand. I also started another that’s just under twenty thousand at the moment. Crazy!

I’m not trying to make this one of those posts where I’m talking about all the junk I’ve done and what’s coming up (Falderal will be out April 20!). What I’m saying is, to me, these projects were enormous! It’s all still super new to me.

The excitement is real. The learning is real. I’ll probably post something more specific about all this in the future, but right now I don’t know when. Now that my second novel is about to be i nthe hands of my editor, I’ve got to finish number three.

Thanks for reading!