Rewrite Complete

Today is the day I finally get to go on a break. Why? Because the official rewrite of Book 4 in the Prideful Magick Collection, Hawthorn, is complete.

Now, I will be the first to admit that it is long, long, long overdue. The reason for that is because I screwed up. Big.

You see, I first wrote the PMC when I was 20. Hawthorn was written literally five years ago. Then I set the series aside for years before going back and working on them individually. Still, I knew the stories all the way up to the end.

I didn't stick to the story.

This past November, during NaNoWriMo, my goal was to rewrite Hawthorn and then have it ready for publication by the spring. I got 213 pages into it before I realized how badly I had screwed up. Thus, I had to start from scratch. That was in January. So the past few months have literally been me trying to salvage what I could, while going back to the original document and telling the story as it was meant to happen, but in a better way.

The truth is, I should have known better. A long time ago, I'd become aware of the fact that I was not a novel writer; I was a storyteller. The difference? Novel writers are outliners. They are the people that know how to move a story forward and have the inciting incident, turning point, climax, etc. all figured out before ever putting a word on paper. I admire the hell out of novel writers, because I can never be one of them. Instead, I am a storyteller. This means that I don't follow formulas. I can't. What I do is meet my characters and transcribe the lives they've seen fit to include me in.

Six years ago, I was introduced to the spunky, young Alexandria Ryder. In the following year, I managed to write five first drafts of her story. As she told it to me. There were no formulas, outlines, plans, or extraneous details. Lex told me her story as she experienced it and I wrote it all down.

When I got to the rewrite for Hawthorn, it started off great. Yet, when I got to around the middle, I realized that I had lost Lex in favor of trying to make the plot more exciting. She ditched me because I was no longer telling her story. That was why I had to start from scratch.

At last, however, the real story is told and now all that remains is editing and the rest of the publishing business. So stick around, because more news will be coming shortly.

(And thanks for enduring the radio silence. Again.)