Novel Creativity

I feel like I’ve been ignoring this blog.

*Checks last post date*

Yes, yes I have.

I swear that this wasn’t intentional. As you might know from my posts and many tweets about it, I’ve been writing a novel. Now, I know that I have a bad habit of not completing personal projects because I had another good idea. I didn’t want this to happen with my novel. I didn’t want a great blog post idea to derail me from the excellent novel writing progress that I was making. So I focused all my creative energy on the novel.

The novel is done now. Or, at least, as done as it’s going to be for now. I’ve entered a very nerve wracking phase called “Giving The Novel To Beta Readers.” During this phase, I give copies of my text to people to read over. They will tell me if there’s a plot hole I’m missing, if the characters seem realistic enough, or if there’s a problem with the story flow.

Once I got over the nervousness of “wait, I need to let other people read this?” I was confronted by the torturer that is the waiting game. At this point, my beta readers have begun their task but haven’t had time to finish. Do they like it so far? Are they shaking their head with every word? I want to know but don’t want to pester them with twice daily e-mails asking for their opinion.

In a couple weeks, I’ll get the reports in and will likely need to make some changes to improve my story. Then it’s time to format my book for printing and get a sample copy to make sure everything looks good. Finally, my book will appear on Amazon. If everything goes well, it’ll be available in early October. (I’ll definitely post when I get a firm release date – also, if anyone is interested in doing a review, feel free to contact me.)

In the meantime, though, I can use this “novel downtime” to catch up with some blog posts I’ve wanted to do.

Thanks to all of my readers who were patient with me while my creative energies weren’t blog bound.