Beautiful Books is a writing link up created by Cait @ Paper Fury. Click here for instructions and links to other Beautiful Books blog posts.

1. What were your writing achievements last year?
   I finished the first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel!!!!!!! And now I get to edit it….

2. What’s on your writerly “to-do list” for 2017?
   ◦Edit this mess of a thing I’m calling a novel.
   ◦Have it ready for beta readers by June.
   ◦Start writing the next book in the series for NaNoWriMo. I really would like to start that in July, but July is going to be crazy busy for me it seems!

3. Tell us about your top-priority writing projects for this year!
   My absolute top priority project is the “shaman novel” that I wrote for NaNo and have already written a lot about. I’m now referring to it as the “shaman novel” because it’s gone through numerous title changes, and I don’t want to confuse you guys as much as I’ve confused myself. The plot is a total complete mess right now because writing the thing in order the first time would’ve made too much sense, so here’s some basic info that you can apply to the whole book!
   ◦It centers around a bunch of corrupted politicians who call themselves “The High Council.” They pretty much rule the world, and if you’re not royal, you are less than nothing to society.
   ◦Naturally there has to be a “lower class,” and they are the shamans. They practice a different kind of magic than all the royals, and they are very much looked down upon.
   ◦There are various practices of magic in my story world, but the ones that come up the most in this book are natural magic, blood magic, and academic magic.

4. How do you hope to improve as a writer? Where do you see yourself at the end of 2017?
   This’ll be my first experience editing a project on this scale and sending it out to beta readers that aren’t just friends or family. My end goal for this year is to be querying for publication, so I’m sure I’ll learn a lot and improve my writing in several different ways.

5. Describe your general editing process.
   Well… Umm… Yeah… Ok… So… Maybe I don’t have a process right now??? I messed up the timeline of this story SO horrifically that I’m still moving index cards around to figure out the order in which stuff needs to happen! After I’ve got my skeleton outline on a bulletin board, I’ll do a read through and put everything in order in Scrivener. After that??? I am seriously considering exporting it from Scrivener, brailling it, and putting it all in binders so I can slap sticky notes all over everything. The flaw in that plan is that I wrote a lot of words, and braille is bigger than print, so that would be a lot of paper, and I’d probably need like five giant binders…. We’ll see if that actually happens! If not, I guess I’ll just put it in a Word doc and leave myself a ton of comments, but oh how I hate using the comment thingy! I don’t know, ok?! Please describe your editing process in the comments below this post…

6. On a scale of 1-10, how do you think this draft turned out?
   I’m going to put this at a solid 3… I think the story is great, but… See my answer to the previous question!

7. What aspect of your draft needs the most work?
   Plot and structure! My character development is really good because I created the characters first and then worked the plot around them, but multiple POV characters and a little bit of a dual timeline made for an incoherent mess because my brain just doesn’t write things in order the first time apparently!

8. What do you like the most about your draft?
   I love my characters! I can’t really explain why because spoilers, but they’re awesome, and I feel like they’re my friends now, and I really hope they’re as awesome as I think they are!

9. What are your plans for this novel once you finish editing? More edits? Finding beta readers? Querying? Self-publishing? Hiding it in a dark hole forever?
   Beta readers, probably more edits, and hopefully querying by the end of the year!

10. What’s your top piece of advice for those just finished writing a first draft?
    Are ya sure you want advice from me after reading this? Really?! Ok… If you’re gonna edit the thing, index cards, sticky notes, Scrivener, and coffee are your best friends!