The Goal of 2018

It's hard to believe it's already the new year. You put your head down at the beginning of the school year and when you finally have a chance to breath - to really look up for the first time - months have flown by. It's been a crazy-fun time, don't get me wrong. But if I'm not careful, certain aspects of my life have a tendency to slip by unnoticed.

I have one main goal for 2018. I have been slowly working on the sequel and as a way to increase my own excitement, I even posted the new title for the second book on Goodreads: Ascent into the Mist. But while I work on that, I have a secondary project that I've grown more and more excited about.

This will require a bit of a backstory. I have probably spoken of this in bits and pieces but here it is in the whole.

When I was in grade eleven I took a creative writing course in my high school. I was obsessed. It was so much fun to be part of a community of people so excited about writing. Each class was a new adventure. So I decided to take part of Nanowrimo that November. At the time I hadn't had any periods of intense writing in years so I had some trouble plotting.

I finally decided on a simple plot about a girl who lived in Vancouver - like me - and enjoyed hiking - like me. Though her personality is far from mine. I loved writing descriptions because I could finally put my beautiful home in words. I wrote about 60 000 words in November, and then finished it up in December at around 80 000 words. At the time I was sick of my characters and the story that when I was done, I didn't want to look at it anymore.

But I still wanted to do something with it. In class we had started learning about the querying process so I thought that I might as well send it off to literary agents. I only edited the first few chapters, mind you, so I knew the back half was a bit of a train wreck.

It still hurt when rejection letters came through but it was easier then because I knew that I hadn't really given it the time it needed. I did get one request for a full manuscript which was very exciting. In the end it didn't work out, but the agent mentioned that perhaps it would work better as a middle grade book rather than a young adult story.

I didn't do anything with it because having finished one book, I was excited to get on to the next. Especially since I was finally giving in and writing a fantasy for the first time. But it has always ruminated at the back of my mind, the idea that I could somehow rework this story I had poured so much time into. I ignored it for a long time because I had heard about so many authors saying that your first book was no good, so I thought that this was my no-good book.

Recently I started to look back over it and I've gotten excited about the story. There are some bits that I'm really excited about and others that I can't help but cringe when I read it. So I have undertaken the project to go through the entire thing as thoroughly as possible and make it as good as I can.

I still don't know whether I want to query it - though I probably will. But it has been a thorn in my side that I've left this book less than complete. Even though all the words are there, they aren't the best that I could have made it.

So my goal by the end of 2018 is to finish editing this novel. The editing process was really fast through the first few chapters because I had worked them over so long ago when I was first querying, but after that it has been slower. I am basically rewriting entire passages because I need to condense the word count from 80 000 to 60 000 which is a more reasonable word count for a middle grade novel.