Updated my story on Worthy of Publishing.

I added to more chapters to what I posted of Empire on Worthy of Publishing. These five chapters make up the first act. The more I have realized this, the more I have also realized that I need to beef this section up. I am very happy with the end. The middle is coming out pretty well. The beginning is the bit that I know will need to be closest to perfect- at least as close to perfect as I can achieve.

I have also uploaded the book to writing.com. I have actually been much more impressed with the level of participation from the site members on this site. Worthy looks better, but I haven’t been very impressed with the level of community involvement I see.

I added a scene to their first chapter that fleshes it out in a way that I like a lot. I am also going to look for ways to get in introductions to the characters without flooding details to the reader. Part of the issue with this is that these characters were meant to be introduced and then removed unceremoniously. I want the reader to feel Paul’s loss. The problem with that is that if the reader only sees them as a wall of facts about them and character qualities, then of course they aren’t going to care about them.

I will probably end up having to add a couple of chapters to this first section, which is probably for the best, since the first act shouldn’t be only the first sixth of the book size-wise.

I went back and forth on making this work available, since it is so rough, but I think I did the right thing by putting it out there. I have to admit that I’m not the best editor in the world. In the past, editing became bastardization. I would lose my confidence in what I had written and go back and change so much that the soul of the piece got smashed into a pancake of bloody gore. This lack of confidence in my writing led me to literally throw away all of my previous writing when I was moving after graduating college. I’d like to think of it as some symbolic gesture, but it was just stupid.

I feel much more confidence now. Probably too much, actually.

I am definitely better at getting out what I want to, but I also don’t want to think my fingers spin gold with every key-stroke, because they don’t. I’d love to just sit back and send it to an editor to save, but that’d be plain lazy and probably wouldn’t make the work as good as if I really took my time with it before trying to send it to the next level.