This is a record of my journey to publication.
Hopefully.
It might also be a public record of humiliation.
I’ve been working on this project, referred to as PubStunt, for a while now. I remember scribbling down the vaguest idea of it in study hall my senior year of high school. Of course, I also remember that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were dating at this point, and the internet tells me that they didn’t start dating until at least a year later. I can’t decide whether my memory is off (most likely) or I’ve fallen through some sort of alternate timeline. (Less likely)
There’s a couple snippets of drafts from the ’00’s on my computer. They’re absolutely terrible, and I can see what late teens/early twenties Sarah was working through emotionally at that point, which is lovely. My main characters have also gone through name changes with every iteration. I can’t remember what they were at the moment, but it’s also interesting to see what names I’ve liked and have fallen out of favor over the years.
This attempt started in November 2014. I had decided to do National Novel Writing Month, despite having just moved halfway across the country like a week prior. I remember writing it with my netbook, with a mattress on the floor, eating little peanut butter cups (which are the best ones, imo) like Popeye devours spinach. It was a different story then, going in a different direction. It made it to 50,000 words, but then I didn’t know where it needed to go next. So it sat in some online storage that I let lapse, so I believed the story was lost for a few years.
PubStunt isn’t my first novel, just the one I’ve put the most work into. I can’t tell you why I decided to pick up this particular story a couple of years ago. I started fiddling with it again and took it to a little writing retreat out in the middle of nowhere, VA, where an actual honest-to-god published author told me that it was really good and that I should keep working on it.
So I did.
Sort of.
I worked on it a bit. Then I took it to a writing conference the following summer, where I got even better feedback.
So I worked on it. A lot. I finished the draft and threw myself into a round of revision. I also started another novel, but that little guy can have his own dramatic blog series. This is PubStunt’s turn.
I finished a second round of revision on PubStunt, and went back for a third. That’s where I’m at, currently. I’m at this beautiful place where I see that I’ve made progress, but then see that I have further to go before the novel is ready to be queried. I started out thinking that this was the line edit draft, only to realize that the belt on the plot is still loose in some places and needs to be tightened up. But that excites me, that I can see it.
I know I have a bias, sitting with this little novel for as long as I have, but I think I’ve got something good here. When I’m not thinking that it’s the worst drivel that humanity has ever produced, I’m really optimistic about what it can become.
With a lot of luck and more dedication and hard work than I currently possess, maybe you’ll see what it becomes too.