Dismantling a Nightmare

Starting this month I delve into the last of my books to rewrite for the final time and after I do this I have to decide if I want to put it back onto the selling block or just hide it away forever so wandering eyes don’t have to stare at the mistake that it has become.

There are a plethora of guides and books on how to be a better writer or how to write a better story/novel.  You can find many in bookstores, libraries, and online for free.  It’s like finding books on personal growth only not in such huge volumes.  What you do not normally find are guides on what not to do.  Then you have writers who discuss their process usually slightly different from the rest.  This isn’t one of those guides.

            Today, this is not one of those guides.  This is the short, painful story of my first novel I wrote from beginning to end.  The novel is called Machete Mauler and it was a story I thought it was cool at the time.  However there are several things I did wrong that made this a huge train wreck and probably the major reason why I’ve only sold one book in my one decade of actively writing.  As I am writing this blog post the original version is still out there to be purchased.  As soon as I get around to tell the publishing house in question to finally take it off their virtual shelves I’ll make sure that dreck will never be found again.  I mean this book actually caused physical pain and I’m not very proud of that.  Here are some things I did wrong with the first novel I began and finished.

            Number one: I didn’t stick to a tense.

            Yep, I jumped around the tense of the story like a monkey first discovering a trampoline.  What surprised me so much was my blatant disregard for not sticking to one tense.  I will point several times to my mentioning that this novel produced “physical” harm as any editor would be induced with at least a headache trying to fix the tense mix up alone.  Try reading one sentence, not paragraph but sentence that changes the tense four times.  Yeah, I did that five times in the novel.

            And number two: I wrote with absolutely no outline whatsoever whether beginning the story or as I went.

            So this created several problems like key supporting characters with name changes or characteristic changes in the middle of the story.  The reader is not supposed to get an aneurysm but I tried to write this book from beginning to end just by sheer memory.  What a bad idea.

            Now I’m going to attempt to a final pass edit on this story.  After I am done I have to make the decision to let this book go back out there to be read or just shove it under the bed in hopes that nobody will ever see it until I pass…maybe.  I’m expecting a lot of watery eyes from this book.

            But it isn’t the worst way I tried writing a story.  The very first novel I attempted to write, and this was back in eleventh grade, I decided to write the first seventy-four pages of the book as the story’s background.  Apparently I thought this was a great idea at the time until I decided to read it one day.  ::SNORE::  Now it just sits in story limbo with a lot of other projects I’ve either started or just mulled over until I finally get around to doing it.

            After these two learning experiences I thought I’ve written two other books at least worthy of other people reading them without me just giving them away.  Daemon  & Shifter have been put through the final pass and are now available in paperback form, however the previous of the two will possibly be put through the copy edit process by a professional then I can finally rest easy on the book I thought I wrote the best.  We’ll see.

 

Now a review

 

Recently I read the novel Blood & Water by Briana Morgan.  It’s a dystopian young adult novel set in the near future set in London and Calais, France.  Rather than going through the arduous task of explaining outbreak disease that rocked the world, Miss Morgan decides to focus on a group of four people; three teens and one of the teen’s older sister as they go on a small trip in hopes to rid the disease that lie in two of them.  The book is written to the point of view of Jay, one of the people with the non-named plague disease as he copes with the severe changes in his life.  Dare I say it’s a refreshing change for a dystopian story (yes I used the word refreshing) to put it on such a personable level.  The only thing that seemed a little rushed and convenient was the introduction to the doctor they went to see in Calais, France.  However her subplot is pivotal to the story, I just wished the author could have integrated her introduction with the story more smoothly.  Still it was an enjoyable read.