To start, let me just say that last week was so awesome. Getting my agent was just as amazing as I'd hoped and made me feel like all the ups and downs in this journey were worth it. The overwhelming support and well wishes I received really filled my heart with pure joy. It's something I'll keep in mind as I start on this new venture.
Since signing with my agent last Tuesday, I wondered if I should give myself a mental writing break before she got back to me with revision notes (and by mental break I mean reading for pleasure or binge watching shows). Since drafting, for me, is pretty time-consuming (since I like to get my first draft out fast), I decided to taper off slowly and paused at a good place--31K.
The snapshot below gives you an idea of how my drafting really slowed within the past three weeks.
It's safe to say I won't be able to finish this draft by the end of the month, so I'm pushing back my personal deadline to my Birthday next month.
Despite my slowed progress last week, I still felt it was productive since I beta read for a good friend of mine (Joan, who is AMAZING, I'm still in awe of her prose), and finished two seasons of THE ROYALS and got to fangirl my heart out with my friend Michella, who introduced me to the show (Jasper + Eleanor Forevvaaaaa). So, awesome week in my opinion.
But alas, it's time to switch gears and go from drafting to revising! It's been about two months since I read my Pitch Wars manuscript so it's been really fun getting back into the story. It's funny, when you work on a story non-stop for awhile, you start feeling like you know the ins and outs of every single scene, but to my surprise, my reading of the story greatly differed from the time I had written it. When I wrote it, I was very sympathetic to my MC instead of the love interest, but reading it this time around, my heart ached over the love interest instead of the MC. I wonder why that was. I mean, I've read this manuscript a million gazillion times, but this reading of it is so different compared to my previous reads. Am I just reading with a more critical eye? It'll be interesting to see what readers think if it gets on the shelves one day.
How about you? Have you reread a manuscript of yours and received a totally different impression of it from when you wrote it? I'm curious to know, comment below!
