Dear Diary

9/17/26: I’m thinking of using this blog as a simple diary of my writing journey. My author friend, Antionette Harris, is doing this, and it seems simple and easy. What better way to record all the ups and downs of one’s writing journey?

Besides, my own first romantasy novel, Bartholomew: A Fairy Tale, is based on a real diary. I think this is why it is so different from the standard romantasy format, because it was inspired by real events. This is causing problems as I try to get an agent or a small publisher. Apparently a standard romantasy has only about 2.5 sex scenes. Mine has so many more, almost one per chapter. So I’m doing yet another revision, listing each intimate scene into a table in Scrivener. Charting exactly how many there are, which chapter they are in, which scene it is, and whether it is vital to the plot, or one I just want to keep, or one that can be cut.

My story is so different and I’ve gotten so many rejections (even though the writing itself is good), that I’m preparing to release it serially online, chapter by chapter. I’ve noticed that I’m regularly guided from Spirit on specific steps to take. In a strange series of circumstances, I discovered highly successful author Seth Ring, who writes LitRPG. I’ve been learning about his writing journey on YouTube and from his brother, whom I’d met. My idea is to follow in his footsteps and try his path: release serially, build an engaged audience and take reader feedback into edits, build your audience first, then self-publish on Amazon with a readership in place.

Of course, self-publishing takes a lot of logistics that I’ve not learned yet (formatting, cover design, etc.), so if a small publisher will do all of that for me, so much the better. I’ve submitted my manuscript to five small publishers recently. Two have come back with “no’s” so far. In the meantime, I’m going through my story to count and double check all the sex scenes, see if I can get rid of any, and do another round of edits, as I’ve been told my book is too long at almost 120,000 words. How times have changed since Outlander and Twilight!