Developmental Edits and Theory vs. Practice

This task I've taken on, bringing an idea to life by telling a story around it, has taken two major efforts. The first has been learning how to create a good story. The second has been maintaining my desire to tell that story in the face of a skill gap that was a lot larger than I anticipated.

Along the way I've also learned a ton about the challenges of getting a story to market. That's not quite right; getting it to market is actually dead easy. Releasing a work that meets professional standards is somewhat more involved, but the real challenge is having the world discover the work. Before the popularity of generative AI, Amazon saw about 150,000 new titles per month. Now that's more like 300,000.

Theory

I love to learn new things. Picking all this stuff up has been fun. The only part that's not as much fun is discovering that stuff I thought I could rely on a few years ago is out of date before I got to put it to use. This isn't a total loss; knowing how something used to work can inform my understanding of how things work now, but it's not as effective.

At least the process of writing hasn't changed, and with a first draft that's essentially complete I was ready to launch into a developmental edit. This is, as the phrase goes, where the rubber hits the road. My learning has equipped me with a good understanding of what needs to happen in this edit round but what it hasn't given me is experience.

In my last newsletter I wrote that I thought that if all went well I'd be able to pass my manuscript to an editor this month. That was laughable. I should have guessed that much like finishing a first draft took many times longer than I expected, so will the developmental edit, and yes, the future steps of getting this thing released are going to take longer than I want as well.

Practice

Right now, it's time to turn the theory of what a developmental edit is into the practice of completing said edit. I confess that this has sapped some momentum, but I think I'm managing to get back on track.

What I won't do is set an expectation for when it will be done. That seems to be a way to make sure I am thwarted.

Abandoning Substack

I suspect this is old news to most readers, so I'll be brief. For a variety of reasons, I'm only going to use Substack for promotion. Initially I encouraged people to subscribe to my blog's RSS feed as an alternative, but as it turns out, technical barriers with RSS tend to put people off. Instead I've added a mechanism that lets people subscribe to blog posts, distinct from this newsletter. Every morning it will send out new posts from the day before, which means most days it sends nothing, for I am not a prolific blogger. If you want my blog posts in your inbox, you can sign up here https://alanlangford.com/blog/​

Podcast Update

My progress partner and I have been going through similar periods of not moving forward as fast as we want to, and dealing with the self-doubt and frustration that results. This is probably only of interest to other authors, but we post our updates in public as a form of external accountability. In out last episode we talk about how we build our characters. If that's of interest, you can find the episodes on my blog.

Closing Image

Where I lift stuff that made me laugh and share it.