/lit/ - Literature

>>21806924
I've written three novels, I self-published the first one on Amazon and Kindle. It was a medieval murder mystery called A Spurious Hanging, and I wrote it at the tender age of 14 and 15, and published it when I was 17. It sucks compared to my writing today, but I was a stupid teenager and it was my first work. I spent countless hours working on formatting it myself, even though I'm not proud of it artistically, I'm certainly proud of the discipline and effort it took to create it. I spent over two years of my childhood dedicated to working on it everyday, and for my 16th birthday my folks commissioned a professional book cover for me. It was the absolute best I was capable of at the time, even though today it wouldn't be close to my current quality standards.

I wrote a second, much longer fantasy novel that I called Desolation's Reach, but never published. It's still on my harddrive, it's extremely long. 250,000 words, about 900 pages, depending on the font size and page size. It was far better than A Spurious Hanging, but by now I was improving enough as a writer to understand my limitations and see how much I was still lacking. While an improvement from my first book, I knew it wasn't good enough to publish, and trying to edit this monster of a manuscript would have been an absolute nightmare. The story wasn't structurally sound, and trying to untangle that mess would require a much more experienced editor than myself at the time. I was about 19 or 20 when I finished the second draft of Desolation's Reach and decided to shelf it for good and move on to the next book.

My current WIP is in the editing phase, and I'm going to publish it. I'm 24 now, and despite being young, I have 10 years of writing experience under my belt, since I've been writing for an hour a day every day since I was 14. I finished writing the book, and I'm in the editing phase. I dare say it's very good. It's a massive improvement from Desolation's Reach, and Desolation's Reach was a massive improvement from A Spurious Hanging. Unlike the first two books, I'm not just proud of the effort I've sunk into the book, I'm proud of its artistic merit as well. I was hoping to publish by this April, but editing is taking longer than I expected--but it's coming out superb, so it's worth the wait for me to give it the attention it needs to polish it correctly rather than try to pump it out now.

It's as long as Desolation's Reach, about 250k words. But it's structurally sound and has compelling characters, it just needs some tweaks to the plot and pacing.