January 18th, 2021 – 845

~ Sam Shuttleworth

I’ve been doing a fresh edit of TUS as I start to pull down all my content from WattPad and I’ve noticed something in need of work: a lot of TUS’s chapters are way too short. I think what this might take is a process similar to my current planning one, where I identify every scene, lay them out and group, merge, order and cut as needed. I’m sporting a lot of areas for improvement.

And that’s a good thing. After all when I’ve tried sending off TUS before now it’s gone nowhere. If I’m seeing issues, it might show I’m closer to the threshold of being publishable in some form, albeit I’m now eyeing the benefits of self publishing ever more. If I can finance my own professional edits and marketing materials, there’s not much reason not to go down the Amazon marketplace route. It also does allow me creative control, though of course I need to be strict in my quality standards or that’ll just look amateurish.

Is this going to be the year I find my feet as a writer? Eh, probably not what with covid and all but I have a plan, or at least the beginnings of one. I’ll take that right now.

Published by Sam Shuttleworth

I’m Sam, and I live to write. I spent most of the first 8 years of my adulthood trying to balance writing with a large amount of crap in my personal life, until towards the end of 2018 I threw everything out and started afresh with just my writing. I built the new me around one goal: I have to write at least 1,000 words a day. I called this goal 1K, and it changed my life. So long as I write a thousand words a day, the day is a success, and atop that I've managed over time to build the life I wanted all those years. My greatest flaws as a writer is I still use too many adjectives, adverbs, connectives as openers, accidental passive voice and I don't force my work down people's throats enough on pain of extreme and unusual torture. My greatest strength is I know my greatest flaws and I'm working on them.