The state of … my book

I finished the first draft of Mirrored near the end of November. If my rudimentary math skills still serve me that was over two months ago. I should be pretty close to getting it into your hands by now, right?

Wrong.

You see, I love my story. Upon starting to edit it, I realized that my book looks like it was written by a guy who had a) never written a book before and b) never written in the third person. Let me throw in a c) too. c) My book looks like it was written by a guy who has never had any formal or informal training on writing fiction. In short, Mirrored is not as good as I want it to be.

In fact, I was so discourage when I first began editing that I completely turned away from it out of equal parts disgust and intimidation. How could someone who reads as much as I do produce something so .. unpolished? I mean, it’s not even just plot or structure or theme. It just looks rushed.

Which I suppose it was.

NaNoWriMo gives you thirty days to get something down. And when you’ve never written before a lot of what you put on paper is probably going to be, well, junk. The bones of a great story are there. I love my protagonist. I love my story. I don’t know that I’ve done enough to make sure YOU love them yet.

I’ve been kicking myself, figuratively, of course, about wanting to get this done by early March. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not sure if I’ll be able to. If I have only one story in me – which I’m feeling is seriously doubtful – but if I do only have one, I want it to be the best that it can be.

So the state of my book is: In Progress.

I’m about 25% of the way through the second draft and the first stuff has been terrible. I’m hoping that as the second draft writing continues that I will find that I got better over the course of those thirty days.

At the very least, I’m hoping that I didn’t get worse.