Writing and storytelling have always played a significant role in my life. When I was thirteen, I began writing a story about a magical group of teenagers set to save their world from a great evil. This story, which I started to write in the summer of 2019, has transformed before my eyes into a book that could be published.
Today, the publishing process is my top priority to complete. Although my book isn’t published, it is still an accomplishment in my life that I am quite proud of.
In the summer of 2019, I began writing for fun. As I came up with a plot and characters for a story, and the story was coming to life before my eyes, the goal soon became to publish a book. At the time, I thought publishing was just around the corner, and I’d only have to write one draft, though it’s been five years now, and it’s still not published. After six drafts and five revisions of the final draft, I still haven’t published my book.
It’s not an easy road to take, as most writers know. It’s a difficult process to begin, look after, and finish. After writing the third draft of my book and finally making it through the whole story, I had people close to me start reading my book. My family was so amazed that I had written a two-hundred-page story at thirteen that they didn’t care about the many grammatical errors or the fact that there were plot holes everywhere. I got a lot of good feedback, though I started to feel that things seemed so dull, no worldbuilding. Despite how much support I had from my family, I didn’t think it compared to other published young adult fantasy books.
I spent about a year strictly working on the worldbuilding of my story. I filled up sketchbooks full of drawings of the characters and maps. I wrote down every little detail I could think of. I even got a book that could guide me through the process of fantasy world-building. Creating a different world with different people, cultures, and values took much longer than I ever thought. I am grateful for the pandemic for giving me so much downtime to write and figure things out. By the fall of 2020, I was back to writing my sixth and final draft.
The first book took four months to write. With school online, I could easily write a chapter a day. Writing was my life, and it made me so excited. Every morning, I’d wake up ready to add to this plot coming together so well. To improve matters, I was even beginning to develop the details of the next three books.
When I finished writing the four books and revised the first book once, I felt relief and sadness. I had been working on writing for over a year on the same project, and then it was done. Again, I began revising the first draft, though editing isn’t as fun as writing. I started a new project for the next six months, and then, when summer came, I started revising again.
In 2022, I revised the second and third books and was satisfied with the product that came out of that. After that, I revised book four again, though I didn’t finish it because book four is three hundred pages longer than the other three.
Today, with each book done and edited, I have been working on publishing it. In 2022, I attempted to get it self-published through Amazon, though at the time, I was quite busy and just starting eleventh grade. So I tried again at the beginning of September 2023, but a new opportunity arose.
I have recently decided that it may be better to market my book through social media. Although I haven’t exactly started the process of doing that yet, I am working out the details of how I want to market it. I hope people will enjoy it, and maybe publishers will contact me. I am trying not to get my hopes up, though I cannot help but wish for success.
