Bouncing Back

I’m back in my writing groove! We did it! Yeah!

Honestly, the whole experience feels much better. I’ve started off rereading from chapter one. Unsurprisingly, I found a lot of things that could’ve been written a little better, so I wrote them a little better. This is something that happens virtually every single time I edit (and I’m only assuming that it’s like that for everyone) but it feels way more genuine this time. And I’m choosing to think that my time away from the novel has helped me find and fine tune my voice and style.

When I said a little while back that I needed to get reacquainted with Hai, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but I’m glad I did it. I noticed some decisions I had made in conveying her thought process spoke a lot louder than I remembered. Going from innocent little girl to traumatized young woman very quickly, I found that I needed to focus more on subtlety early on to really grasp her naïveté and purity. And I’ve done a very similar thing with Ze.

Yeah, I could go on and on about how sobering this feeling is, but it all amounts to me just being glad that I’ve finally found myself able to work on it again. I’ve got a lot of work to do to have it all finished by the end of year and that’s still my expected completion date. I just have to hold onto this feeling for a couple months and keep up the momentum, and hopefully I’ll be diving into the exciting reality of finding a publishing agent and subsequently a publisher. Yeah!

Thanks for sticking with me thus far!