In the words of DDP – Self High Five

What’s up everyone? I hope you’re doing well out there and keeping cool in all the heat waves going around the planet.

There will be a little self-patting on the back here in a moment but for now let me explain what’s been going on with my writing and a serious issue I ran across.

When I wrote this story I broke it down in parts (currently 10 parts, but not a finished story yet) and wrote each part with a specific story arch beginning middle and end and these parts range from 10,000 words to 20,000 words. Ok some are more around 8000 but you get the idea. Anyway, I’ve been going through each of these parts and running them through spelling grammar and punctuation checks cleaning up everything that I can.

Well on part size I noticed the word count was, well exceptionally high even for the way I write and it’s because somehow part 3 got copied over to the end of part 6. Thankfully (as seen in the photos) I have a hard copy of the book that I printed out 10-12 years ago something like that and it was a life saver because I’ve been able to go through and verify where part 6 ends and remove the stuff that shouldn’t be there. *How* that happen I don’t know, file corruption maybe? I do have like a dozen burn copies of the story so I’m not extremely worried but it’s bothersome.

So I printed up the first 162 pages of the story and after I get a couple different colored highlights (to signify different changes that need to be made) I’m going to read through all of this and make sure everything makes sense and is in order.

Now for the self-pat on the back. When I started working on these books (there’s four separate books in total but PIAB is the strong one and stands alone and if anything can open doors for me it’s this book) I felt a lot of self-doubt. Honestly I knew I was creative and could come up with stories on the fly, but I always thought that compliments made on my stuff was like patting a child on the head, almost dismissive if that makes any sense. The imposter syndrome is strong with this one.

I’m just going to say it, this story is awesome. I’m not going to get ahead of myself, but I’m starting to believe the people who said this story needs to be finished, needs to see the light of day.

I’ve never allowed myself to sit back and just view this as a reader, it’s always been an escape when writing it. Now I really thing it belongs out there in the world, I think it’s strong enough to be seen.

Yeah, what was the DDP Nirvana rip off ring song? Self High Five.

Really it’s about time I started believing in myself and what I can do.