In the hands of my beta readers

My first self published novel is being assessed.

It’s part of the Haunted Hearts series of books to be released leading up to Halloween. All have been written by a different gay male author and each is an Urban Fantasy MM Romance.

This is also a project with a tight deadline so my initial draft has been edited over and over, and is now with my designated beta readers (who are two of the authors involved in this project). And even before they send me their notes, I already have some planned rewrites of my own.

I always change the font when I edit.

It helps me discover the manuscript like a reader, rather than the author who wrote it. Because I’ve done so many edits in a short space of time, my last font change was not your typical book font. Besides assisting me in tidying up my prose, this odd font helped me spot two lines of dialogue which were inconsistent for their characters.

This project has given me healthy stress.

Because this needs to be ship shape in a matter of months, I’ve become obsessed with it. When over half of the initial draft was written, I went through and changed it from third person to multiple first person POVs. I felt there was a lack of connection between the reader and the characters, and believed I didn’t have enough time to develop that connection in third person.

The night before I wrote this blog, I decided to rewrite a chapter. In the current scene I feel I shame a character. There is often a difficult scene in my WiPs which I rewrite over and over. If time allowed, I would have devised questions around the nature of shame and shared them on my socials. I would then use the hive-mind of my followers and delve deeper into the nature of shame, trying to say something profound in this chapter.

I have an alternative scene idea which still allows my character to come to the same decision, but it will be more fun and link to a theme already in the story.

I’ll need to learn how to format this book myself.

This is all new to me but all of these authors have self published before, so I’ll have plenty of help. The cover art has been done and I’ve already contacted an affordable editor who one of these writers recommended.

So, Grayson’s Magical Mishaps is currently being written. It’s a comedy horror with mad twists and turns about a young man who discovers he is a wizard.

And the way he discovers his magical powers is one of the weirdest plot points in this story.