Not my first Rodeo.
A lot of the comments I’m getting (which are amazing, by the way) express surprise that I’m a first-time author. As I’ve mentioned in my bio here, on Amazon, Good Reads and BookBub, I’ve always been a writer. My first book was when I was 15, and this was the “inspiration” for the Less Than Zero Series that we have begun with Ty & Zoey in Endless.
In my “real” life (yes, I still have my day job) I write hundreds of pages of material a week – just not fiction writing.
One of the reasons I decided to start this journey is because I work with so many creative people in my day-to-day life that my own creativity has been bubbling up and dying to get out.
With my husband’s encouragement and two of my friends who have been with me since the first book – well— that’s how we have Endless.
Writing Process
As an avid romance reader myself, I didn’t take any formal classes or workshops before I started writing. I relied upon my observation of story structure and followed the lead of authors I like.
My first draft of Endless took about 8 months and countless rewrites as I went. I had no idea how to keep track of everything that I’d written because most of my writing was done for a couple of hours each night and sometimes longer on the weekend. I wasted a lot of time going back and re-reading what I wrote to make sure I had consistency.
Then, once I was “finished” I would re-read everything again in context, make notes and then tweak. This process repeated many times.
Finishing the Book
I remember writing the end, which is pretty much unchanged from the original version, and feeling this HUGE sense of accomplishment.
Before I can take all of the accolades, I have to give shoutouts to Grace and Jen, my two editors. For those of you not familiar, there are two processes. The first is when you get a very substantive edit – this can include typos and grammar but it also goes into consistency and story-telling. That edit is possibly the single most important reason why I’m getting such great reviews.
You need someone to check you – to push you to be a better writer. Grace did that for me – she took what was a good story and made suggestions that made it better. I ended up revamping about 100 pages – and most of those rewrites involved really taking the reader on a journey.
The proofreading edit is equally as important because by the time you’ve written and then re-read your book about a million times, you really do not see any typos. So you need someone new to point them out to you.
I hope hearing about the process was interesting – feel free to leave me a comment below or shoot me an email at kaylenewinterauthor@gmail.com.
