Hi all. I finally decided to take one piece of my work seriously and get it sorted out for submitting to an agent. (Not looked for one yet) So I started to edit, polish, sort out all the little mistakes and reduce my font size on every page. I just wish someone had told me how long it takes! I have over a hundred and fifty pages to do, it's never ending. This is definitely a labour of love.
I found one problem is knowing when to stop so you don't lose all the immediacy of the original draft. Then there's the problem of pacing the narrative - the last edit of my first story reduced it by around 3k words, but in the second I thought it was too tightly written so I added a couple of thousand. Weirdly they both ended up at roughly the same 112k length, though from the off I thought the second would end up a fair bit longer.
Hi Jeremy. Oh my goodness I hope it doesn't take me that long to do it! I know what you mean though because I've noticed parts that need extending, cutting back, deleting etc. It's unbelievable how time consuming it all is. But it's all part of the path we've chosen to go down.
I started writing my memoir in 2011. I spent about 2 years writing my book, Is it about that boy?
I then spent the next 5 years editing, polishing, expanding it at one point to over 100,000 words, then cutting out everything irrelevant, then editing and re-editing down to a published memoir of 60.000.
I self-published the book on 18th May 2018.