I can’t believe it was all the way back in May when I said I was nearing the finish line with my next book. Here I am in early August, and that statement is finally true. Sarah’s Journal is a mere 15,000 words long, and, though it depends on your reading speed, the average person could comfortably finish it cover-to-cover within an hour or two. It’s not even long enough to be a novella. But if I start counting from when I wrote the first rough outline, it’s been 14 months and one day since I started this project. In that time I went through 9 drafts of proofreading and editing and had the story looked over by 3 other people.
My first book, Rava’s Awful, Amazing Day was half as long, had only three drafts, and never had a beta reader before it was released. But it taught me that I was capable of finishing a book, even if it’s a very small one. With Sarah’s Journal I went all out, taking what I’d learned from Rava’s Day and building on it by adding illustrations and doing the layout entirely by hand in Affinity Publisher rather than tweaking Scrivener’s compile settings until I liked the end result. Despite its short length, this has taken a massive amount of time and effort, but I’m really happy with how it’s turned out. This will be a far more polished story, and I can’t wait to release it.
Sarah’s Journal will also be professionally printed as a perfect-bound paperback (meaning it has spine and is held together by glue – as opposed to saddle-stitched, which is a stapled floppy) rather than as a homemade zine (I honestly do love the rough charm of homemade zines, but Sarah’s Journal was both too long and too aesthetically ambitious to work as one). I’ll be receiving the physical proof sometime in the next week or so, as well as the bookmarks I made to match it.
It’s really exciting to see this project coming to fruition. After months of agonising over the digital files as I fixed and polished and perfected everything, soon I’ll be able to hold a physical item in my hands. And if all goes well, in a few months, I’ll be able to put them up for sale so all of my readers can, too. Feedback from the beta readers has been really positive, with all three of them stating that they got so sucked into the story, they had to go back and consciously look for any mistakes. And all of us have worked really hard to identify and correct all those mistakes (though of course, because things couldn’t be too perfect, as soon as I finalised everything with the printer, I spotted a small typo I’d missed in all of my 9 passes. Since I’m hoping no one will spot it, I’m not going to say what it is. :P)
I also have something exciting to announce soon, about a collaborative zine in which I contributed a short prose story. I can’t say anything about it quite yet, but it shouldn’t be much longer.
I also have several more WIPs of varying lengths that I’m working on. One I hope to release before the end of 2021 is a short story that, like Sarah’s Journal, also takes place right after Eryl’s prologue. It’s estimated to be around 2.5-3K words and is titled The Trail of Orphans. It will provide a small glimpse into elven biology – and society – within the world of Dark Wings. I also have a novella for Kira’s backstory I hope to pick up again sometime this year that’s 2/3 written and has been sitting unfinished on my computer since 2016. That one will be a long time before it’s ready to share, but I think my readers are really going to enjoy it once it’s done. The other prose WIPs waiting in my Dark Wings folder are less far along, and in my ‘someday I’ll get back to this’ pile.
With each book and short story I finish, my confidence grows a little more. Whether I will ever be a best-selling author, or even find a publishing house, is anyone’s guess. But the point isn’t to become rich or famous. It’s to build myself up a little more with each project, to show myself that yes, I can finish a story. I can get all these ideas in my head down on paper. And I can do it with a certain level of competency and show improvement every time I label a draft ‘finished’.