Introspection about The Other Half

I began this site when I started seriously looking at publishing. I had written several serial stories and posted them for free on other sites, gotten wonderful feedback, and felt that urge to jump into the shark-infested waters of becoming a published author. I was still in the midst of writing one of those serial pieces when I launched the site, but I was determined to keep the two separate. Yeah, that’s a bit daft, but that was my goal.

Five months later, and I’ve decided to take one of those serial stories to Amazon. I wanted to use something that was familiar to learn the ins and outs of converting to the proper format. I wanted something I was comfortable with to scour cover artists for the one that made me think “YES! This person nailed it.” I wanted to jump off the cliff into the circling fins while still wearing my yellow floaties.

So, I chose the first of my serial stories, a long and rambling piece I called The Other Half. Originally posted to an erotica website, the tale of Michael Zakhara and his mate, Kristiana Latimer, contains at least 30 characters, several minor story arcs, and some really awful point of view issues. Really, really awful ones. But the meat of the story still grabbed me. It was one I really wanted to tell, and tell it better than I had in that rough draft two years ago.

So I began the painful process of editing. And oh was it ever painful!

Some people call it “killing your darlings.” On his blog, terribleminds, Chuck Wendig tells us to hack away at the pretty, pretty peacocks. I loved the peacock analogy because it just fits. The original has all these extraneous scenes, even extraneous characters, that truly add little to nothing to the overall plot. As I began the edit, I realized they would have to go. I removed entire chunks of text. I cut back stories that fleshed out unnecessary characters, info dumps that made the brain numb, and characters that could be rolled into others already established as important. I cut a crap-ton of scenes that occur from one of the seemingly millions of points of view in the story. I’m only 70K words into the edit, and I’ve already cut over 50K words. 50-fucking-thousand words! I still have over 40K words to review, edit, and chop away at.

That’s a lot of damn peacocks.

On the flipside, I have added several thousand words. Perhaps as much as 10-15K of new material. Material that makes certain things make more sense, that ties into the sequel There’s a Fine Line, or that fleshed out the areas I thought fell short of the mark in the original. It’s been a long and painful and utterly enjoyable process. Early reviews of parts of the revised text are promising.

The easiest of everything has been the cover. I admit to playing a bit of cover artist roulette and hoping I found a winner. I believe I did. Laura LaRoche from LLPix Photography designed the excellent cover below for The Other Half. It’s exactly what I wanted. Michael in his natural form, Kris with her spunky attitude, and the hotel in the background. Perfect. Now to get back to those edits so I can get it out on time!

Cover for the first novel in the Revelations series.