Hello everyone and welcome back. I hope the week is treating you well. I haven't decided how it's treating me yet, but I suppose tomorrow will be the judge of that. Luckily I will have Friday to recover before going back to work for a little bit on Saturday, so that will be nice. Doesn't mean I have to enjoy it. I did learn of a new Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor though...I want to eat it.
I wanted to take a couple steps back and look at something we've touched bases on before, mostly because of just how important it is to remember. When you're doing your first draft you are thinking, somewhere in the back of your mind, that there will be things you need to fix, but there is likely something that is fighting against logic that is saying there aren't many. This is what we are going to look at today, because frankly, it's important to remember that your first draft is going to be terrible.
I'm not saying terrible story-wise, mostly because that would make me an absolute jerk, and hopefully by the time you're actually writing out your story you've come up with a story that you enjoy to the point that you have written it out fully and still enjoy it when you're done with it. I'm talking when you go back over it and start finding things like grammar issues, spelling, or words that really shouldn't be there. You are going to find a lot of them, and it's important not to feel surprised by this. When you're writing out your first draft there is so much going on that your thoughts and your writing method are crossing over each other, this is what causes things like typos and misplaced words. It's just something that happens, and also why you don't necessarily catch them when they happen. You are so focused on getting everything out right then that your brain makes you see everything as being correct so you keep going. Now this isn't to say there won't be some typos you catch are you write them, but I'm talking about the ones that are missed, and they will be there.
One of the things I ran into, especially with 'Daughter of the Shackled King' and most recently with 'Feathers of the Dead' is that because they were handwritten first, I became impatient with some details while writing, so there are a lot of places where more exposition is needed that I just haven't put in there yet. Not to say this doesn't happen with stories that are subjected to one medium, but for me it is far more apparent with those two because they were/are in the notebooks first. I wanted to get to a specific scene really badly, and writing out all those pesky specifics took a lot of time, and also my hand was cramping up. These are things that are going to be added in during the editing process, and will also add a lot to the final word count to the story. The other thing is that moving something from a notebook to a computer there is a lot of risk for even more typos than normal because you are constantly having to switch your focus between the original material and then typing it out.
It's important to remember that when you start your editing process and you start to see just how much needs to be fixed or adjusted that you don't get discouraged. It's the first draft for a reason, and while your brain might have wanted everything to be 100% perfect, that just isn't going to happen on the first go; especially with something that is potentially over 100 pages of text. There are so many people that start editing and get frustrated to the point where they just stop because they can't handle having to fix things they don't feel should be there and it's just so sad. Those stories never get finished because they can't get passed the fact that editing is part of the writing process too, it just might not be the most fun part. You can't let yourself get caught in that cycle too, so just remember that each time you fix a word you are one step closer to making your story a highly polished piece of gold and soon the world will get to see it.
Thanks everyone for stopping by today. I will see you all back on Monday. For now, I hope the rest of the week is nice to you and please check out 'Rending the Seal' available on Smashwords, and please tell people that you didn't get it on Amazon, that would be great because they are seriously being jerks right now.
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