Everyone is Happy

Not much to blog about this week, because I've been concentrating on competing a different major milestone: the final round of major edits on my first novel, Pegasi and Prefects. (Lesbian YA coming of age low fantasy story/romance set in an alternate universe 1940s--I am so not good at genres.) Just final line editing and finalising to go and then... The cover artist will finish in May.*

This is particularly significant to me as it means finishing a major project, and overcoming my biggest barrier: letting it go. I have finally told myself it was rewritten and revised enough, that this was as good as it's going to get. I hope that signals that I will be able to do the same with Everyone is Happy.

The other thing that is relevant is that I now have a bundle of knowledge on what it is like to plan, write and polish a novel as opposed to shorter works. (Biggest lesson: editing and rewriting takes much, much longer than writing.) Next time, I will, hopefully, have learned from experience, and work more efficiently. Just like my Masters thesis was a doddle compared to my Honours one.

It also involved learning to use a new piece of software efficiently. It was my first time using Scrivener instead of Word or Google Docs. It took me a while to get to grips with all the features and flexibility it offers, just like I am getting to grips with exactly what I can do with RPGMaker.

Writing P&P is mirroring the process of this game. I had false starts on other novels/games before finding the ideas that would carry me through. I am also going through a lot of "I wish I had known/done that". But that's okay. I will learn, and I will get there, and in the meantime, creation is sheer joy.

Well, mostly sheer joy. Running through every option in a conversation is the pretty much the equivalent of scanning pages to see where I've used a hyphen instead of an em-dash. But even that has its rewards, because it's all about making a story I want to tell shine as brightly as I can manage.

* This is not the place to explain why I've chosen to self-publish and make my novel available for free instead of trying to find an agent to represent it or try to place it with a small press, or self-pub and charge for it. It's enough to say that it's the option that makes me feel happy. And it's important that everyone is happy...