The End
A few days ago, I hit a big milestone.
I hit THE END on my revisions of The Unbreaking of Hannah Cole.
Now, it feels a bit corny to celebrate hitting THE END of a book that I’ve already hit THE END of a few different times, but this is well worth celebrating. This revision took over a year, added several chapters to the book, and removed about a total of 12,000 words from the book.
How do you add more chapters and have so many fewer words? A LOT OF CUTTING.
Starting with the prologue, the prologue that I absolutely loved, but it was way too tonally different from the rest of the book. It was much darker, and much more intense, depicting my main character in conversion therapy when she’s rescued by police and medics. I had a lot of people telling me that the prologue just didn’t fit, and eventually I had to listen, even if I wasn’t happy about it.
What gives me solace is knowing that it still exists, in a separate document. Maybe we’ll include it with the 10th anniversary edition, or something.
(It’s these little delusions that help keep writers from going off the tracks.)
Anyway, it’s time to find a handful of beta readers, and get their feedback on the book. It’s something I haven’t done much before—other than the agents who’ve requested the full manuscript in the past, only three other people have read this book from beginning to end. Before I send it out to agents again, I’d like a few more to.
This book has been my albatross for a long time. It started as a completely different book when I started writing it in 2011, when I queried it in 2016, when I queried it again in 2021, and now.
I’d like to think it’s getting to its more perfect form. Let’s hope so!