Hello, Readers! Clevenger here.

We did it! Or at least, we did part of it…

On June 10th, Graham and I released our book to 10 beta readers, and are giving a small group of friends a chance to read our story for the first time. I’m still in shock.

Graham and I have been friends for nearly a quarter of a century. We’ve talked about the origins of the story, little bits of our legacy that have invested themselves in the tale. All of our years together as friends have shaped our story bit by bit. To see that, now close to complete, is something special.

It’s not the final milestone… but it’s a big one.

The writing process has been a complicated, but enriching experience. We have looked at so many ways to get here. Do we need Alpha readers? Do we need critique partners? How about Beta readers? What is right for us?

Well, we did our best with what we had.

Finding critique partners was extraordinarily difficult. We used websites; we poked around on some blogs, but nothing seemed to work. They weren’t getting us the quality feedback that we wanted. But we felt confident in our choices, because we were acting a lot like each other’s critique. Pushing each other’s scenes forward, making small edits, and refining our work.

When the first draft was done (83K words) we gave it to a friend and co-worker of mine who is a novice author. She read it, gave us her feedback, and put in some questions/ideas. It confirmed we were on a good path, that our story had merit.

Then, the revision process began. We added scenes to build characters, dropped hints and foreshadows that we now knew would pay off, and we also saw how much we had learned. For myself, there were several scenes that I wanted to go back and completely rewrite. The “idea” was true, but the execution could be improved. I had learned so much about POV, structure, and immersion that I knew my scenes could be stronger. And I was right.

When we finished the revision, our baby was now 102K words! It was a great feeling. We knew our book was a better version of itself. And now, we had to decide what was next.

So we agreed to do a beta read. Selecting friends and family that are Sci-Fi Fantasy fans, we gave it out to see if they would connect to our story. Hopefully, they will feel the same as we do. But for now, it’s out of our hands. We hope to get their feelings by next month, and we’ll see then. We expect that we’ll have some revisions to do afterwards, but hopeful that it will be minor.

But after this milestone…. now what?

Well, we begin planning for publication. There’s a lot of things to discuss there, and maybe… just maybe Graham has some words to say.

Until then,

Be Kind.

-Clevenger