Hi!
I’m going to chronicle my journey in getting published. To make this first blog post not completely worthless, I’ll kick off this category right here!
Let’s start with what I did before needing to find a publisher: I wrote it!
The Game of Senet is the first legit book I’ve written (I’m not counting the ones I’ve written that will never see the light of day).
The journey of this novel has been a long one. Super long. I began plotting it with my cousin and BFF, Gina, back in 2012. It’s currently 2019. Fortunately for my sanity, I haven’t been with these characters for that long. Because back then, they were completely different. They had different names. Different goals. Slightly different personalities. Well, everyone except for Amasis, who turned into my main character.
In fact, Amasis ended up being my MC for the very first novel I ever wrote. Yes, I wrote a spin-off before I even wrote the original that I was currently plotting. It was 2013 and the first time I decided to tackle NaNoWriMo, or, National Novel Writing month. Every November, writers accept the goal to write 50,000 words in a month (I haven’t lost yet!)
Finally, in 2014, I started the first version of The Game of Senet. Only back then, it was called Creatures of the Night. Very different titles. For the next two and a half years, I wrote this novel. It ended up being a whopping 300,000 words. I felt accomplished. I finally finished a full story after roughly three years of plotting and writing. I let it sit a couple of months, not knowing what to do with it. I’d edit it a bit, but I didn’t really connect with it. Something felt off.
Then, I attended an amazing writing class. It was taught by the wonderful Lisa Didiano, who has an MFA in creative writing. She took us through the basics: how to plot, how to develop characters, how to write dialog, all the good stuff. It when I realized what was off about Creatures of the Night. It didn’t have a point. 300,000 words and it didn’t have a point. None of my characters had a specific point of being where they were. And when they were there, they had no reason to care. It was all so obvious.
So, on the last night of my class, Gina and I sat in her car in a parking lot discussing the details of why our first massive story idea didn’t work.
“We need to tie up the plot,” we said.
“The characters are weird and unrelatable,” was another talking point.
We went through all of Lisa’s lessons and combed through the story, deliberating what didn’t work and what would work.
After about 30 minutes of sitting in an abandoned parking at 10pm, we said all we needed to say. We stared at each other in silence, knowing what needed to be done. It couldn’t be edited. It needed to be re-written from start to finish.
And thus, The Game of Senet was born (of course, I didn’t re-name it for another three years, but that’s a whole other blog post). The first chapter was written in December of 2016 and was promptly followed by a viewing of The Santa Clause.
To quickly sum up the three years I spent writing it: The first draft was roughly 70,000 words. The next was 90,000. Then, I sent it to Lisa, who became my first official professional editor. Her main piece of advice wasn’t my favorite: she wanted it to be twice as long. She claimed there was much more of the story to be told. She was right.
Another year later, I completed her edits and sent it back to her. Now, she has 160,000 words to edit. Now she gets to comb through 160,000 words of potential typos, misspellings, and plot holes (but let’s hope not).
Hey, she asked for it.
