Recounting My Writing Journey - Chapter 4

Emerald Shadow: Azure Light Book II​ / 2020

To all those who are new here, welcome! I am working through my publishing process for each of my published works and recounting some of the things I have learned along the way. I hope you find these posts useful. To everyone who is returning for this new chapter, welcome back! Let's dig in!

My debut novel, Azure Light, took me over five years to write. Aside from that first book, its sequel, Emerald Shadow, took me the longest to write. I immediately started drafting this sequel the moment I finished writing Azure Light, and I continued writing and re-writing this story from different angles for over three years. I think I re-wrote my first chapter alone at least nine times. 

I took this novel to a class I was taking in my final semester of college in 2018, long before its first draft was completed. In this class, everything I wrote for this novel was put under a microscope - by my professor, and by my peers. That was hard to take, but I learned SO MUCH from it. In this class, I learned how to write a cover letter for a publisher, and a synopsis for a publisher, which is very different and far more detailed than a cover synopsis. I had no idea! It never occurred to me that publishers want to know everything that happens in your story, and that spoilers were actually a good thing.

I also learned so much more about world building in the most unexpected ways. My story was put to the test because the majority of the other people in my class were readers and writers of nonfiction and realistic fiction. Fantasy was something not many of them were fond of.

So, I had to really dig deep and tap into my descriptions. Show them what the world was like, rather than expecting them to imagine it on their own. Sounds easy, right? Sounds like common sense. But for me, someone who has been reading a wide range of genres my entire life, someone who could build an entire world and play an entire cast of characters by myself growing up, this was a major challenge! I saw what I wanted everyone else to see when I wrote, but it took extra focus and extra work pulling myself out of my story to really see if what I was putting on the page was actually what I thought I was putting there. This is still something I'm working on, and this is the reason my work goes through so many layers and types of editing. 

When I finished drafting the story and started in on my first whole-book developmental edit, I ended up re-writing it yet again, this time pushing myself to write chapters from different character's perspectives in order to show everything that was going on in the story at one time. This really brought the story to life for me, where before I felt it fell flat.

Then, I realized something else - my story was inconsistent. I had items that I had created or mentioned in the first story that I thought, "I'll definitely remember to bring this back up in the sequel" that I completely left out! I had scenes where a character was holding something one moment and then the item was gone the next. I also realized inconsistencies with the characters, and some things they were doing in the story that were out of character. This was not because it was intentionally written that way to further the plot or give depth to the character, but because I simply wasn't thinking about those things when I wrote those parts of the story. 

Discovering these inconsistencies prompted me to do two big things:

First, the discovery prompted me to push my deadline. I had never done that before, but I ended up totally reworking my launch checklist and the deadline I set for myself, because there were a lot of holes that needed to be addressed. 

Second, I went back and re-read my first book. Have you ever gone back and re-read your written works once you were published and well out of the editing phases? Let me tell you, it was shocking. Even in just a few short years, my writing skills had grown exponentially, as had my attention to detail and my editing strengths. Still, reading the first book was also enlightening, because it brought up a lot of details I had forgotten over time. So, with several colored markers and a giant poster board, I started writing everything down. I made note of every character trait I wanted to address, every device I wanted to incorporate in the sequel, every setting descriptor that I could transfer and build upon. 

With this new tool (which I would much later learn is called a style sheet), I went back yet again to do a major re-write. I hired a model (Thank you, Alex!) for the cover, and got everything ready to go, formatting and all. Then, I decided to do my final line editing and copy editing on paper (I usually do these final edits on a printed copy - it helps me keep better track of things). Rather than printing everything out again, though, I ordered my proofing copy and edited that. That was so much more convenient! I loved going through the book with a colored pen and marking everything up, and then it was much easier to put those edits back into my computer, because the book was already bound, and therefore I wouldn't have to shuffle through, mix up, or lose pages. 

​There is one more huge new thing I learned in the process of putting ​Emerald Shadow out into the world: Book trailers, related artwork, countdowns, announcements, and reveals are crucial tools to marketing. I made my first book trailer. It was awful quality, but I did it, and I learned a lot from it. I did my first cover reveal and posted on social media regarding my book, and I got a little more traction for this second novel than I had for any of my other books up to this point. 

Everything in that last paragraph is always work in progress for me, even still. With each book, I grow a little more confident. I learn a little bit more about the process, and about my process. That's all I'll write for now. Check back next Saturday for the things I learned from Clairvoyance and other works I wrote around the same time. 

See you next week! ​