From First Draft to Refined voice: My journey back to book one

As I considered what my topic would be for this blog, I thought the potential writers among you might enjoy jumping onto my learning curve with me, in case you ever navigate your own writing journey. Believe me, writing is one of the greatest joys of my life, but things are not as easy or straight forward as you may think if you want to achieve significant success. I have certainly learned many lessons, but I suspect I haven’t even scratched the surface.

I published my first book From Promise To Peril in 2021 and have sold thousands of them since that time. When the sequel was published in 2024, the quality of my writing had noticeably improved. While my readers found both family sagas entertaining and insightful, there was a definite change in my writing style. It had matured and become more refined.

When it was time to submit another printing order of my first book a few months ago, I chose not to rush the process, because once I identified my problems in the manuscript, I did not want to print anything that was less than my best. There was no quick solution, so I began another complete rewrite. Over the ensuing eight or nine months, I meticulously reworded certain scenes to flow more smoothly, especially the dialogue, which was a bit choppy. I also eliminated many of my redundancies, my unnecessary repetitions and generally, polished the rough stones. Although the storyline did not require any substantive changes, I also had to be mindful of maintaining the consistency of the story to merge perfectly with the already published sequel, with one notable exception. I made a promise to my devoted readers, many of whom are seniors, to significantly enlarge the font size by about fifty percent.

Initially when I published my first book in 2021, my publishers cautioned me against increasing my font size because doing so would significantly increase printing costs and ultimately, it could affect the suggested list price of the book by about an extra fifty percent.  There is an old saying that I never forgot after selling life insurance for over 25 years - the only thing better than finding a new customer, is keeping an old one. Please forgive my reference to ‘an old one’ but if the shoe fits, then so be it. It just so happens this is particularly true for the thousands of my elderly readers. I will do my best to keep you posted, but at this point the second edition of From Promise To Peril should be released about the end of May.

Please let me know if this blog was relevant to you, or even a bit interesting if you are not planning to become a writer. I have always found that if I could learn from other people’s mistakes, rather than my own, the lessons of life are so much less costly as to time, energy, frustrations and money!!

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