Joshua P. Simon - The Accidental Author

With the official release of my first novel Rise and Fall tomorrow, I wanted to take a few moments and look back on what it took to get this book published.

I first started writing around March of 2010. I got about 10,000 words into a story when I realized I didn’t have much of a story at all, just a mash up of scenes and characters with no clear path of where I wanted to go. I scraped most of what I had written and started working on the outline that later became Rise and Fall. The only things I saved from those first 10,000 words were half a scene I used in Chapter 2 of the book and several of the character/place names such as Kaz, Tobin, Jonrell, Bronn, and Elyse.

After spending a couple of weeks outlining, creating an ugly map, and doing some basic world-building, I started writing the book on April 27, 2010. Progress was really slow at first. Referencing my daily word count tracker, it took me about a month to write one of the early chapters.

Still, I wrote just about every day through the end of the year. Around that time, I went back and started revising the first 25 chapters to better solidify the ending based on some deviations from my original outline. I wrapped up the last few chapters of the book in the early part of this year.

Then I went through several revisions and around April 2011, I gave Leah a copy to read over. She made some recommendations which based on our discussions I then incorporated into my next round of edits. Then, rather than continuing with more edits, I decided to take a break from the book and wrote a few short stories that so far only family has read. I also wrote the first draft to Walk Through Fire, the prequel novella that will come out in April 2012.

I revisited the manuscript one more time with a fresh set of eyes (which helped tremendously) as I edited once more before Leah performed a line edit. Leah’s next pass helped me tighten things up greatly. Then the manuscript went off to betareaders and while they read the book, I outlined Divide and Conquer (the second book in the trilogy) and started working on that while also revising Walk through Fire, and securing an editor.

I got betareader comments back, made another pass through the book, and sent the manuscript off to my editor. I wrote Warleader while he went over the novel, worked more on Divide and Conquer, finalized cover art, and worked on marketing myself as a writer.

Next, I received comments back from my editor. Based on his suggestions I cut a bunch of stuff I didn’t need, added a few more scenes and information for clarity, all while tightening my prose.

After a very tiring yet satisfying year and seven months, it makes me very happy (and a bit nervous) to know my book is finally done.

Looking back, it’s surprising to see just how much I was able to do while working a full-time job and fulfilling my other responsibilities to both God and family. It’s also a bit daunting to think how much work there is to do in the next year and a half or so as I work to get everything else published in the Blood and Tears world (2 novellas and 2 books left to be published).

I guess it’s a good thing that I can get by on a little sleep!