12 years is a long time to spend on a project, but when you’re a baby author with a haphazard first book published in 2013, the ambition behind the project is huge, and you go through blockage, work for a living, etc., etc., etc., it really isn’t much.
But with an alpha read enlightening me to how terrible that first draft was, blathering around to remove all the dross to arrive at the basic narrative, an epiphany changing the ending to what it really should be, and getting a manuscript assessment changed the project forever.
What followed was a second draft that was leaner, meaner, and shorter than that 600-page, 200k word monster I started off with, written to satisfy a reader rather than tell readers what I wanted to say.
A year and a few months of intense, critical work later, I put the final full stop down and went looking for beta readers, and now with their reports under my belt, it’s time to get the book up to querying standard—yep, I’m going into the trenches, with self-pubbing my backup.
I’m not sure how long it’ll take me to make the necessary changes, but it’ll stretch out to more than the second draft’s 89k work total—insofar as I’m adding descriptions, more dialogue tags and action beats, all the sensual details, and squeezing a few extra bits in.
And with luck of the draw and catching an agent or publisher in a good mood, I’ll be able to sell Cole’s story to Australia at least, and maybe the world. Not a bad thing for a Bipolar/ADHD author working 4 days a week who had a dream and somehow managed to spit it out onto the page.
So don’t forget to subscribe for updates, and I’ll go and see how many chapters I can polish in the first full week of October 2026.
