The Back Story of My First Book's Writing

My first  book started out as a 2012 NaNoWriMo dare. NaNoWriMo is a the National Novel Writing Month (https://nanowrimo.org/) which is in October each year. My friend Jan (still a friend) said that we all should try it. The object is to attempt to write 50,000 words in a month. If you do the math you find that the goal is to write 1612.9 words a day. Now there are days that you might meet such a goal, but to do it every day for an entire month is a special kind of crazy that they cherish.

I wasn't able to do much more than 1000 words at a session and quickly found that I was more content with 500 words a day. But if you do a different sort of math you'll find that if you write 500 words a day for a year you have 182,500 words which is a very respectable novel. You can even skip a few days. (NaNoWritMo conveniently skips over the fact that 50,000 words is not really considered novel-length anyway.)

So i kept plugging along for more than a year and with some struggle with these concepts called Plot and Story, I actually had something. Then came months and months of copy editing that two friends were very nice to help me with (one friend is paid, one is my sister who was being nice.)

I attended a writer's conference on how to approach book agents and I learned a little about "pitching" the story from a writing coach. I queried about 25 agents and didn't get very far. I had resolved to contact 200 agents when I heard about She Writes Press from another writer friend. She Writes Press is a full-service book publishing (editing, cover design, bookstore access), but the author contributes to some of the up-front costs (currently $5900). Because you are sharing some of the initial costs you get a lot more of the sales back and you have fewer hoops to jump through just to get anyone's attention which is what is intriguing me. The catch is that they don't take everyone, so it's entirely possible that they'll say: "It needs more work." The other catch is that you realistically need to do more publicity which can get expensive.

So why haven't I submitted the asked for first 20 pages to them yet? Um, because it's terrifying. I and a lot of other authors fear that they won't be able to write a second book and I'm writing a series, so, I set the book aside and started working on the second book which I was stuck on chapter 3 for a long time. I think I'm unstuck now and see a way through things.

So now I have two choices. Go back to trying to get the first book published or keep writing the second book. I have That Sinking Feeling that I will just want to completely rewrite the first book and I might never finish it. There's a book called Beautiful Ruins and one of the characters just keep rewriting his first chapter over and over again which I find just tragic. I'm not in danger of that, but it would be nice to get the first book done even if I'm going to hate it once it finally sees the light of day. (I actually like it right now.)