So this is Part Two in a series of posts detailing what I’ve learned about writing and publishing over the past three -ish years on my road to finishing my novel and working with an agent and eventually trying to get published.  For Part One, go here, and make sure to read about how I’m totally not an expert and check out all the helpful links that can educate FAR more than I can.

With that out of the way, I’m going to tell you my story, for my novel and what my experience has been.  That doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s experience, or that you should expect it to go similarly for you, but it might at least be helpful in reading about how the process has been working for me.  This installment is primarily about AGENTS.

I finished the first totally complete draft of my novel in January of 2007.  I had been working on it (among other projects) off and on (and while working full time – and picking up my life and moving from Los Angeles to New York) since sometime in late 2004.  Many people can do it faster than that.  I hope my next one will come faster but that’s how long it took me to get my first novel to “the end”.  And to top everything off this draft was short to boot.  Clocking in at only 55k words, a length that is “technically” too short for most fiction, even YA (young adult), but there it was.  Complete.

So I started the process of having a few people read it.  As this was my first time finishing a novel I didn’t have any beta readers.  A beta reader can be defined I suppose as someone that doesn’t have a personal investment in you (like your boyfriend, best friend, parents, siblings, etc.) and it’s usually somebody that is also either a writer or an editor, or at a minimum a voracious reader.  Though I find you’re better off with the former as their notes tend to be more focused and the critique more intensive.  So though I didn’t have beta readers technically, I did have some amazing people in my life that were writers and artists that I hoped would be able to separate their affection for me from their ability to constructively critique the manuscript.  This sort of worked and after getting feedback from three or four friends I embarked on revisions.

I finished the revisions in April of 2007 and sat on the new manuscript for nearly four months.

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