Great News! Blades of Fate is Ready.

After some work, I've finished the draft of Blades of Fate. It is now ready to be sent out to my Alpha readers. If you want to be one of those, feel free to leave a message on this blog post and I'll connect with you to send you an electronic copy of the book for your reading pleasure. They say a writer learns something new with each successive draft, so what did I learn while doing this?

It's Okay Not to Change Things
I've always sort of drafted with the idea that something was going to have to be changed in each successive draft of the book, like a major plot point. Cutting a character. Something. With this draft, I specifically told myself that unless something major needed to be changed for specific reasons, I was not changing anything. As one of my friends likes to say, I tend to rewrite books from the ground up. I told myself I was not going to do that this time around. Does that mean I think I turned out a perfect book the first time? No. However, is it a good enough book that major rewriting wasn't necessary? Yes. Therefore, I'm going to send it on as is to those who will read it and decide whether or not they love it before I make it available for actual purchase.

Part of this is trusting in my own creative process. My drafts are usually pretty good in that they don't have major holes in them. A tweak here or there is enough to make them readable. In this case, I changed the setting of one scene and added a snippet of another in order to make things a little more exciting. However, those changes were late stage changes that didn't affect the overall trajectory of the novel. They just added spice.

That's the good news for this week. Look for another "Hacking My Brain" next week when I talk about Treats versus Rewards.