A Bitter Winter is coming (Beta read starting soon!)

Hi everyone,

Today, I have a momentous milestone to share with you. The Bitter Winter rewrite, 1st pass edit is now complete!

Bitter winter 1st pass edit 100% completed

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.

 

Wilmar Luna

Wilmar Luna

Couldn't be a superhero in real life so he decided to write his own. When he's not creating empowered female characters he can be found watching films, reading books, and playing lots of video games. Buy his books here: https://www.thesilverninja.com/purchase/