The Book of the Dragons

In January of 2006 I decided to start a book. I had toyed with the idea of writing for some time, but had never really done anything about it. I was afraid I'd invest a lot of time into something that would never pay off. Then I decided that success didn't matter if I was having fun. So, I started writing. I've been doing it for almost two years and I've come back on that a little. I do want to be successful. I want to be published and I want to be able to do this full time. If that doesn't happen, I won't quit writing, but this is what I want to do with my life.

I'm not really sure where the idea for my first book came from. I just decided on the genre and started putting ideas together. Ideas became more ideas. Those ideas became paragraphs and eventually became an outline. That outline created the first draft of the book. At the time I thought it was really good. It sucked. It was a skeleton: all the pieces were there but there was not meat. My fourth draft, now, has gotten up to 113,000 words. I'm told that the absolute cap for a first time fantasy author should be 120,000.

Now on my fifth draft, I'm going through and using MS Word's tracking and comment features to find little errors and mark them and to find parts I could remove and rework. Once finished, I will query all the publishers I can get to, starting with the big ones and moving to smaller ones. Afterwards I may self-publish and see if I can sell on my own, though I'm not holding my breath on that one.

The point of my blog entry today is that I'm halfway through editing this draft, after only a few weeks, and hope to finish soon. It will be exciting to start the submission process again. Wish me luck!