Hi everyone,
Today, I have a momentous milestone to share with you. The Bitter Winter rewrite, 1st pass edit is now complete!
This has been a long time coming on a road fraught with pot holes and dead ends. What started off as a simple science fiction fantasy action novel, gradually transformed into a novel which asks the reader and its characters, what is the price we pay to live in a technology driven world? And what is the value of failure?
When I first started this project, I was incapable of writing the story as it needed to be told. Two dimensional characters, purple prose, flimsy plot, plot holes, you name it I did it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I committed every writer sin in the book except for self description in the mirror. I wrote thousands of pages of action scenes and ended up throwing away 97% of it.
I found out fairly late in the game that if you didn’t care about the characters, you weren’t going to care about the action.
It seemed no matter how many times I rewrote the book from start to finish, I couldn’t get it right. I needed some help.
Maybe it was coincidence or serendipity, but I discovered an editor who later became my mentor. Through her workshops and guidance, I slowly began to identify why my rewrites continually failed to hit the mark. Instead of making it up as I went along, I wrote outlines which I shared with my editor. We went back and forth for several months and made changes and tweaks here and there until some semblance of structure finally took place.
Though I had built the structure, the book lacked a key ingredient. It didn’t have its soul.
In other words, the theme of the book was missing. I thought it was a revenge story about a female cop who goes on a rampage to avenge her fallen partner. Then I tried to simplify it and told myself it was an action story about a female super heroine, but neither of these concepts rang true for me. For two years I kept asking myself the same question every day. “What is the truth of this story?” There were times where I even said to myself aloud, “Cindy, what the hell are you trying to tell me?”
And as I neared completion of my rewrite, it had finally hit me.
“Tell the world that I’m not a failure.”
Just like that, Cindy went from an annoying, hated, unlikable protagonist, into an empathetic, troubled, ruthless heroine (or so I hope).
So what happens now?
Now that the 1st pass edit is complete, it’s time to prepare the manuscript for a beta read. This will require some minor clean up work which should take less than a week to complete. Once that’s done, I will be releasing the manuscript to interested beta readers in order to collect their feedback.
Do you want to be a part of the beta read? Get in touch via Facebook, E-mail, Goodreads, or Twitter, and I will make sure to send you a copy.
I hope you all enjoy the book once it’s finally ready to be published.