S. W. Raine

Project Elementals is finally off to my alpha readers.

It’s about time. This trilogy has been kicking my butt for a while, and things just keep slowing me down. Project Elementals started off as my NaNo 2011 and 2013 projects. It was going to be my first published work, but I shelved it in favor of The Techno Mage. You can read about that in my blog posts here and here.

I knew I eventually wanted to get back to it, especially with a bit of experience under my belt, so I chose to do a complete rewrite for NaNo 2021. You can read about it here.

The rewrite itself was a challenge, but mostly because of the characters. Their personalities had changed so much from the 2011 and 2013 versions by the time I tried the first rewrite in 2017. So, bearing in mind how I envisioned the characters during NaNo 2021, I took an enneagram personality test for each of them and stuck to the results as I did the rewrite.

(There are nine enneagram personality types. As much as I love the zodiacs, I could never understand the individual personality traits, and I never understood the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator traits. But enneagram? Oh, I totally understand that. But this is a discussion for another blog post entirely.)

When it came time to start my first round of revisions, I figured I could have it done and to my alpha readers by January 1st, but I wasn’t done. And I wasn’t done by February 1st (you can read more about that here). And I barely made it to March 1st. I actually finished it on March 3rd.

I was being too much of a perfectionist. I was trying to do ALLTHETHINGS all at once, then ended up freezing from overwhelm, then I would nitpick instead of making any kind of progress. In the end, I had to remind myself that:

• – I’m only aiming for “Alpha Reader Ready” and not “ARC Reader Ready” (thanks, mum!)
• – I can’t compare my chapter 3 to someone else’s chapter 9
• – I’m still a beginner and haven’t yet found my groove
• – I can look it up later.

This week, I’m starting my first round of edits while waiting for alpha reader feedback. I’ll be following a handy checklist I made for myself so that I take it one step at a time and hopefully not end up freezing from overwhelm or nitpicking.

Here’s to a smooth editing process and a good month.

Raine