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November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

NEVER FORGET:

My Son Was Murdered, The Killer Walks Free, Your Child Could Be Next!

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FAQ: What are the most visited pages on this website and how many visits do they get?

Several years ago, I wrote an article on how to write different types of magic uses, or rather how I personally write various types of magic users within the context of my Quaraun books. Today that page is one of my top ten most visited articles. It gets 50 to 500 views/reads/hits/visits per day depending on the time of the years and has had over 200k visits total since it was published.

Amphibious Aliens: Debunking The Atwater Family's Alien Abduction Hoax with more then 30MILLION reads since 2007 and The GoldenEagle: Debunking Stephen King's World's Most Haunted Car Hoax with over tenMILLION reads since 2007 still rank as the two most visited articles on my website, but, neither of those are writing related.

Writing Medieval Servants is my most visited writing related article with over 7MILLION reads.

The most requested, but apparently not so easy to find writing article is EelKat's Park Bench Method To Writing (you have to scroll half way down the page to find it. It's after the list of writing prompts). The name of the page is NOT "EelKat's Park Bench Method of Writing" which is why you guys have so much trouble finding it, LOL!)

This website was started in 1996 and has 1 to 3 new articles (all written by me, I am the only writer on this site) published almost daily. In 2017 we crossed ten thousand articles published. As of 2023, EACH article gets MINIMUM 10 to 70 reads PER DAY, with the high traffic articles getting 500+ reads per day.

And since December 2019, my website now gets three hundred thousand to 7 million reads per month - well over ONE HUNDRED MILLION PAGE READS PER YEAR, making it not only the single most trafficked site in the State of Maine, but also one of the most visited websites in ALL OF NEW ENGLAND!

{{{HUGS}}} Thank you to all my readers for making this possible!

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 TRIGGERED! I'm a Straight Cis Woman, but I am deemed Too Gay For Old Orchard Beach, Are you too gay for the bigoted, minority harassing, white power, gay hating psychos of The Old Orchard Beach Town Hall Too? 

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My Editing Process:
A Look At How My Novels Go From Draft To Publication

Here is the June 1, 2021 update to this:
(The original article from 2018 is below this update.)
(You can see the difference in what I do now from what I did than, and it'll probably change some more if I update this again 3 years from now.)

>>>When should I start rewriting? 

After you have finished your first draft.

If you start editing, revising, and rewriting BEFORE you finish the first draft, how will you know what to revise, what to rewrite, what to edit? Sure, grammar and spelling, can be fixed as you go, but when it comes to characters, plot, world building, and loss ends, you won't know which ones need work until you have finished the first draft.

If you start trying to fix things before you finish writing, you may end up creating more problems than the ones you fix. So write first and fix later after you can see the entire draft as a whole.

>>>I’m about 32,000 words (~30-40%) into my story. 

Uhm... so you are aiming at 60k to 85k words?

And you are talking about world building which means you are writing Fantasy because you don't world build in any other genre.

Which indicates that you think 50k is a novel and Fantasy is longer than normal novels, so you are aiming at 75k. I've been seeing A LOT of that the past 4 or 5 years. I hope you are planning to SELF-PUBLISH and NOT submit to a trade publishing house, because they look for around 200k for a Fantasy novel with world building.

You DO know that 50k words is NOT a novel... right? It's not even a novella, according to Harlequin who publishes short story collections that are 150k words long and contain 3 short stories that are 50k words each.

And yet, millions of wannbe, newbie writers who know nothing about the publishing industry, bounce around the internet saying stuff like:

>>>“How Long Is a Novelette? Any work of fiction with a word count between 7,500 and 19,000 is generally considered a novelette. A novelette is longer than a short story, which usually has a word range of between 1,000 and 7,500 words, and flash fiction, which is usually under 1,000 words.” (You can read the full article here.)

You know the funny thing about that is: Stephen King's shortest short story is 47,000 (forty seven thousand) words and his longest short story is 75,000 (seventy five thousand) words ... yet many people would call those numbers novels... and both those where published in magazines that had stated a short story was anything 25k to 75k, while short-shorts were listed as 10k to 25k and flash fiction listed at anything under 10,000 of course that was also in 1983 when most novels were 200k minimum Of course most of his novels top 300,000 words so, I suppose it's all a matter of perspective.

I am fascinated though by the fact that what we called a short story in the 1980s is considered a novel by today's standards. I think it's weird how everything in publishing - novels, novellas, short stories, is about 3/4 the word counts they were in the 1980s. I'm wondering what caused it? Do writers just write less so publishers changed the definitions to match or did publishing houses change the definitions first and writers wrote less to make new shorter publisher guidelines?

Bailey School Kids, easy reader chapter books for 5 to 8 years olds, are 30k words by the way, and the teeny little skinny Nancey Drew Books for 10 to 12 year olds are 75k words. While Harry Potter is 230k words. So kids books are still published by the old word counts of the 1980s... it's only stuff for adults that have deeply warped shorter numbers these days.

I think it's probably a reflection of adults reading less these days so publisher guidelines for word counts are being drastically cut down just to try to keep books marketable to people who don't read much anymore

Either way, it feels strange. Back in the 1980s I was constantly struggling to get my short stories long enough to reach the 30k to 75k that literary mags wanted, and now today, I can submit novels to publishers that are shorter than the short stories lit mags in the 1980s wanted. It feels weird looking back on that. I'm still writing stories stories in the 75k range, but in the 1970s and 1980s those were short stories, now today I still write that and they are published as novels. Weird.

Back to your question of editing though, after all, editing is what we are supposed to be talking about here.

Of course, you can't edit a novel if you don't even know what constitutes a novel, right? So knowing what word count = a novel, should be a good place to start.

Of course if you are planning to self publish, than who cares about word count, right? You can self-publish in the knowledge that you will be publishing things that are too short to be called a novel, along side around 20million other self published authors on Amazon who also had no clue 50k was NOT a novel either. So you certainly will not be alone in your ignorance.

I point all of this out, because you said this:

>>>I’m about 32,000 words (~30-40%) into my story. 

...and implied that you are writing an Epic Fantasy novel (which was confirmed by reading your profile and other posts on Reddit) and yet, you seem to be of the delusion that 75k words is a LONG or EPIC sized novel, when in fact 75k words is considered ONLY A SHORT STORY by the ACTUAL publishing industry.

Remember, any idiot can say a thing, but that doesn't make it true, so just because 20million brain dead idiots on NaNoWriMo call 50k words a novel, doesn't mean it's true, and heaven help you when you submit a short story as a novel to a publishing house that is going to laugh in your face while they toss rejection slips at you.

I'm sorry to be a barer of bad news but, if you want to PUBLISH your Epic Fantasy novel, than 32k words is closer to only 5% of the word count you should be aiming at, not 40% of it. 

You want to know how to edit your novel and you don't even know what word count publishing houses classify as a novel. I think you might have bigger things to worry about than editing, and I think your Fantasy may be a Novella not an Epic Length Novel.

Now, there is nothing wrong with writing Novella length Fantasy. There is a market for it, and in fact, that's the market personally write for. The Quaraun novels are VERY SHORT most of them only 80k to 115k words each, so classified as long novellas by most publishing houses, which is WHY I self publish the Quaraun books, because they just ain't long enough for publishing houses, who expect 150k to 300k for a Fantasy novel.

There is nothing wrong with your story being just as long or as short as it needs to be, but, from your posts, you seem to be aiming at trade publishing an Epic Fantasy and that means a publishing house like TOR and that means you should read their publishing guidelines to find out what THEY classify as an Epic Fantasy, because they want 150k to 300k PER VOLUME of a trilogy, meaning the full story you are writing should end at around 900k words. Yes, just short of a MILLION words for ONE story.

And you say this?

>>>I’m about 32,000 words (~30-40%) into my story. 

Yeah. You haven't got a clue. You might want to try READING some ACTUAL Epic Fantasy novels to find out how big those things really are.

Again, writing short Fantasy is not a bad thing, I just think you are quite a bit ignorant of which word counts = which book sizes and which genres = which word counts.

EPIC in Epic Fantasy means NUMBER OF PAGES in the book, not wizards and dragons. You seem to be confusing EPIC Fantasy with HIGH Fantasy. EPIC Fantasy means a novel with 800+ pages per volume. HIGH Fantasy means it has wizards and dragons. This is why there is also EPIC High Fantasy and EPIC Low Fantasy and EPIC Dark Fantasy and EPIC Historical Romance (aka The Fabio books) and EPIC Paranormal and EPIC Horror (think Stephen King) genres as well.

Remember EPIC means the printed paperback is 800+ pages long and if you are 40% finished at 32k words than your story isn't even close to Epic length.

And perhaps this seems off topic to a page on editing, but, part of the editing process involves editing your manuscript to be what the publisher wants and if you don't even know what word counts trade publishers expect from your genre than you are in for one hell of a surprise after you spend months of editing, only to find out no one will publish it because you seriously misjudged what wordcounts publishers look for because you believed lies taught to you by NaNoWriMo.

Moving on...

>>>The issue is that as I’ve gotten further into the book, I’ve noticed how I failed to flesh out a lot of characters and do important world-building. I’m not sure if I should keep writing or start rewriting.

The fact that you have noticed it is good.

TYPE RIGHT INTO THE DRAFT ***So I noticed I failed to flesh out this character; flesh out this character during editing*** than move on and keep on writing. 

And when you notice you've missed some world building, TYPE RIGHT INTO THE DRAFT ***So I noticed I need to add more world building details here*** than move on and keep on writing.

This is what I do.

That way I won't forget that I wanted to improve the character and I'll have a note typed right in the draft, to remind me to fix this character. At the same time, it doesn't stop me from writing. I just keep writing the story.

>>>I’ve done a rough outline and I know where the plot is going, so I’m not worried about losing myself in the editing, so to speak. It’s sort of difficult to keep writing when I keep running into issues related to earlier chapters. I feel like I’m creating more problems, but I’ve always heard that it’s best to finish before editing. Thoughts?

Yep. This is what I was talking about before, back when I said if you start trying to fix things before you finish writing, you may end up creating more problems than the ones you fix. So write first and fix later after you can see the entire draft as a whole.

Personally, I like to just rush through and finish writing down the whole thing, so that I get the entire idea down on paper before I forget it. For me, writing is like reading and I never know ahead of time where the story is going to go. I just give the characters free reign and follow them where they go.

So, yea, I finish it before I start editing it, but my 1st drafts are usually a total mess, full on shit, because I just write it out as fast as I can to get the whole thing out on the page. It generally takes me 3 to 7 days to write the first draft. I don't pay attention to grammar or spelling or logic. At this point nothing matters other than getting the full story out on the page. I can fix everything later. 

Now, this next step, I'm not sure if YOU would classify it as rewriting while writing... I do not, but I think some people might see it that way.

Anyways... here is a thing that I do WHILE WRITING the first draft...

When I write, I get into a "ZONE" a mind set where I just zone out everything around me and I get full focused on my writing, to the point that I literally can not see or hear anything going on around me. People have had to physically shake me to break me out of it so that I could see them in the room or hear them talking to me... I have Kannar's Syndrome aka ACTUAL Autism, not to be confused with Aspergers which is in no way, shape or form related to Autism. NO illness on the "Autism Spectrum" has ANY relation to Autism. The Autism Spectrum simply means "an illness that is sometimes misdiagnosed as Autism because of similar symptoms". Zoning out and becoming fully focused on what you are doing, to the point you can not see or hear anything around you is a symptom of Autism.

Well, when I write non-fiction, this zoning out doesn't happen.

Zoning out like this ONLY happens when I write fiction.

And here's the "weirder" part of it... I CAN NOT write fiction UNTIL after I have already zoned out.

This means, that before I start writing a novel, I have to meditate for several hours to trigger this state of mind to begin with. This is WHY I never know what I am going to write ahead of time.

But than, even with my 91 words per minute typing speed, at best it takes 3 or 4 or 5 or more sittings to finish the first draft.

Well, this means I need to get back into the zone before each writing session, BUT, it'll be a different novel that I write each time, and NOT a continuation of the one I started the day before.

So... to avoid starting a new 1st draft each day and instead finish the one I started yesterday, I start out day 2, day 3, etc. of writing the first draft, by reading everything I wrote so far.

Yes. I start at the beginning of the draft and read the entire manuscript, fixing grammar and spelling as I go, adding things as I think of things to add, and by the time I get to the point where I left off, I'm back in the zone and start writing again, like I had not stopped at all.

I suppose you could say it helps reimmerse me in the story?

So, that may seem like rewriting to some, but, I don't see it as rewriting. I see it as part of my personal method of how I write my first draft to completion.

In the end, this means the 1st draft will have a lot of plot holes and things not fully fleshed out or well explained, and some lose ends will not be tied up at the end either. But, I've got the whole idea down and now I can go back and flesh it out.

Usually my 1st draft ends around 50k to 80k words (I average 17k words a day; but I'm also doing this as my full time "9 to 5" job and write 8 hour work days, and have been doing this for 42 years now - I don't recommend striving towards those kinds of word counts when just starting out, build up to is slowly over time, just like you would for lifting weights in the gym).

In the 2nd draft, I read the whole thing, and as I get to points that make me think: "Wait, shouldn't this happen?" I add new scenes in those points. In places where I think characters are lacking, I add more info. In places where the world seems empty I add more life to it.  

While it took me under a week to write the 1st draft, each rewrite may take 3 months or more of 8 hours a day of doing nothing but editing and revising and rewriting. I usually end up adding 17k to 25k words to the story during each rewrite I do, but I also end up removing a lot of scenes, and saving them in a new file for maybe using later in another novel.

I repeat the whole thing again in the 3rd draft.

I often do 7+ drafts of each novel, editing out errors, fixing mistakes, added scenes, removing scenes, reordering scenes, fleshing out characters, changing up dialogue, building the world, and fixing plot holes as I go. I don't set out to do a planned amount of drafts, I just do a full rewrite and if when I'm done, if it feels like it needs more work I rewrite it again. And I just keep doing that until the story feels completed and polished as best as I can make it.

Usually my final published novel will be around 115k to 120k words, even though my 1st drafts usually ends around 50k to 80k words. 

Also, I usually put the 2nd draft away for a full year, before going back to start work on the 3rd draft. But again, I'm doing this as a full time job so I usually have 12+ novels I'm working on at any given time, so I have other drafts to work on while that one sits for a year.

This method may not work for everyone. I'm a full on pantser, so it probably won't work for people who plan ahead and outline. But for me, this is what works so this is how I do it, but yes, I finish writing the full first draft before I start editing, revising, and rewriting.

>>>At what stage do you pull in beta readers?

>>>I've been working on a project for a while now and have spent some time charting the plot and getting a feel for the characters. Now I've actually started writing and working through the story, but I can't help but wonder at what point I need to start thinking about beta readers. Are beta readers only sought out after you've completed the first draft? The second? Is it ever beneficial to have a beta reader work through your draft as you draft? Do you even need a beta reader or is it possible to self-edit well enough to by pass one?

I see different people do it different ways.

I feel, if you want beta readers before the first draft is done, go ahead, just make sure they are aware they are reading a WiP. 

Do know that what Reddit users CALL a beta reader, is NOT what the actual publishing industry calls a beta reader.

Most Reddit users usually mean friends, family, and random strangers they meet in writing subreddits, when they say "beta reader". They'll read anything for free, and don't mind inkject printed stacks of loose paper or drafts in the body or an email or pdfs in an email attachment. They are not trained professionals so they WILL miss seeing most spelling errors, they WILL NOT see most grammar errors, they often have no clue what the industry standards are for word counts and genres, they rarely have any training or knowledge of character development or plot structs, so they'll they'll tell you how they fell but shrug and say they don't know what made them feel it.

Just know that ACTUAL professional beta readers, people who do this for a living an charge $40 to $60 an hour to read your books, EXPECT a proof copy of a paperback book that a mock up that looks identical to what the finished paperback will look like. They have English degrees, they know grammar rules like they were tattooed on the back of their hand. They know how to dissect and diagram a sentence - and if you don't know what sentence diagraming is - few people on Reddit do - you might want to consider if you know grammar well enough to write.

>>>I ask because recently I've been running into small issues as a write, usually concerning small details or decisions I need to make about characters which could affect how the story plays out long term. Sometimes when I have these dilemmas I write make a quick decision and move on, but other times I feel at a complete loss and have the urge to consult someone and discuss what would be best from the story. I definitely don't feel like I am at a point where I'd feel comfortable showing this work to someone else, but I'm interested in knowing how to determine the right time for this.

Take your draft, start at the first sentence, diagram it.

Move on to the next sentence: diagram it.

Continue this way, until you reach the first sentence that is written incorrectly. You will know it is incorrect, because you won't be able to diagram it. 

Pull out your English Grammar and Composition book. Look up the grammar rules about the error in your sentence. Read the entire chapter. Do all the writing exercises it says to do. Now review your sentence. Fix it. NOW diagram it.

Continue to the next sentence in your draft: diagram it.

Move on to the

 next sentence: diagram it.

Continue this way, until you reach the first sentence that is written incorrectly. You will know it is incorrect, because you won't be able to diagram it. 

Pull out your English Grammar and Composition book. Look up the grammar rules about the error in your sentence. Read the entire chapter. Do all the writing exercises it says to do. Now review your sentence. Fix it. NOW diagram it.

Continue to the next sentence in your draft: diagram it.

Move on to the next sentence: diagram it.

Continue this way, until you reach the first sentence that is written incorrectly. You will know it is incorrect, because you won't be able to diagram it. 

Pull out your English Grammar and Composition book. Look up the grammar rules about the error in your sentence. Read the entire chapter. Do all the writing exercises it says to do. Now review your sentence. Fix it. NOW diagram it.

Continue to the next sentence in your draft: diagram it.

When you reach the end of your draft... NOW read it start to finish. With all the bad grammar now removed, the plot will flow smoothly, and you'll able to see what the issues WERE (they won't be there any more) with your story and you will find writer's block melt away and your troubles writing disappear.

Bad grammar is VERY difficult to read, even for the author writing it. Authors who haven't mastered proper grammar rules, struggle deeply through writer's block and plot holes, and when you write in bad grammar, you unknowingly CAUSE your inability to think clearly about your plot.

When you go back to read what you wrote, to think of what to write next, and you can't clearly understand what you read, because your wrote it in bad grammar. But fix your own bad grammar and BOOM, it's clear to read, clear to understand, and suddenly BOOM, you know what to write next because your brain is no longer tripping on your bad grammar.

Learn how to diagram sentence, practice by diagraming 100 sentences a day (yes, I do this). It really WILL be the best thing you do to improve your writing.

Most people who can't put their finger on an issue in their story, have that problem because public schools stopped teaching sentence diagraming in 1997, something that used to be a required class. Once you learn how to diagram a sentence, words, plots, and stories start flowing very smoothly. Just as houses without foundations crumble, so too do novel plots written in improperly structured sentences. Before you pay someone to be a beta reader, ask them to diagram each of the first 100 sentences of your novel. Than heck to make sure they did it correctly. If they can't, than find another beta reader, because they don't even have knowledge of basic 4th grade grammar, if they can't diagram a sentence.

If you are having trouble with your plot and you can't put your finger on it: diagram the sentences.

>>>At what stage do you pull in beta readers?

Me? AFTER, I've done all of my drafts and edits and rewrites (there are usually 7 drafts, over a period of 3 years, for each novel) and after I do the proof copy mock up typesetting. So it has the final cover art, back blur, copyright pages, ISBN, 13 blank pages at the beginning and end, and everything all ready in it and looks EXACTLY as it'll look when it gets delivered to local bookstores. My beta readers are getting an ACTUAL paperback proof copy of the book, not a bunch of loose pages printed off an inkjet or worse the whole thing as a pdf in an email.

 I have paperback proof copies printed up, one for me, one for my editor, one for each beta reader, usually around 30 proof copies are printed. I tell the beta readers take a red sharpie pen and write EVERYTHING you think of in the margins, cross out things you don't like, correct anything you think needs correcting. Massacre it. Make it bleed read. Write whatever comes to mind right in the book, as they read it, don't want to write something later, you might forget it. Get your first reactions down as you think of them, so I can see EXACTLY where you had that reaction.

It's the very LAST step before publication. And they have 1 week to give it back to me. When I get the proof copies back, I go over each book line by line, consider their notes/advice/edits/feedback, while I have the final typeset manuscript open on the computer, and I make changes to the draft as I see fit, based off what I read in the proofs as I read the notes readers wrote in the proofs.

Within 2 or 3 days of getting their feedback back, the final typeset is delivered to the printer and the final copies of the books go to press. The book will be published and on local shop shelves within 2 weeks after the beta readers have seen it.

No one, and I mean, NO ONE, sees ANY of the drafts until less than 30 days before it is ready to go to the printer.

I use a lot of "free online resources" when I am editing, and I've listed a lot of them further down this page, including to detail how I use each one. But before I get to that, here is a list of "infographics" which I also use when editing, just because damn, do these have good editing advice on them, and it's easy to open them on the screen beside my draft and look through my draft for the things on these lists.

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

Here is the original article from 2018:
(You can see the difference in what I do now from what I did than, and it'll probably change some more if I update this again 3 years from now.)

>>So, I have come across many people saying things like "the first draft is total shit" or something along those lines. They say they rewrite their story multiple times until it is 'perfect'. To me, this just seems like a case of bad planning.

>>I have made a more-or-less complete outline from start to finish and am now busy writing it all out. Sometimes I expand upon a scene or add a new interaction between characters, but nothing big. It is far from being 'total shit', it just needs some careful editing here and there. So far, it seems completely unnecessary to me to create a second draft when I can just edit the bad parts out of my first one and make that into the final version.

>>Do you guys often rewrite parts or even the whole of your story? Is your first draft really that bad compared to the final product? Personally, I prefer spending a lot of time on creating a good outline instead of meticulously rewriting the same chapters over and over.

I can not speak for others as each author has their own methods, but I can tell you what I do and the hows and whys behind it.

Depending on how you look at it, you could say that each of my novels goes their 12 to 17 drafts a piece OR that it was never anything other than a first draft. Yey, how is this possible? Well, here's what I do...

An idea pops into my head, and I could be anywhere, doing anything. I have a very busy life and am often on the road or otherwise away from the computer. So, I keep a notepad (pen & paper) with me at all times, and whenever an idea pops in my head, I write it down. It may be just a one sentence idea, but in most cases it's an entire 2 or 3 page scene of dialogue between 2 characters. It could be an idea for a project I am working on already (I currently have 81 novels in various levels of completion) or an idea for a completely new novel.

When I get back to my computer, I'll create a new text file on EditPad7 and type up exactly what I had written down earlier. Depending on how much time I have at that moment, I may either just type up the exact words and save, or I may, right then and there simply keep on writing and see where the scene leads to. Often, what started as a quick 400 to 700 word jotted scene on paper, will expand to 10,000+ words within 2 or 3 hours of typing it up.

If this was a new project, this quick mind-flow hash out will serve as a shaky first draft or quasi-outline for the finished product. If it was for a project already started, I will move it to the folder, where the original project's draft is stored. Each novel has it's own folder, and the files with-in it include not only the draft itself, but also any research notes, character profiles, world building notes, rules of magic, rules of the land, random stuff written about the characters and setting that will never be included in the novel but I need to remember for how those things affect the story, links/bookmarks to sites with more research, and of course, any of these previously mentioned random brain-fart ideas that may or may not become a fleshed out part of the story.

Each of my novels, usually takes a 4 or 5 year process of starting with a random idea and then letting it slowly snowball into something bigger. And while I personally consider it to be one long process of creation, and therefor simply one draft, that eventually reaches completion, I feel that most other authors might look at what I do and translate it as many drafts being reworked and editing, a dozen or more times.

The finished product is considered (by most of my readers) to be what many have termed "avant garde" or "artsy-fartsy" and technically is classifies as Literary Fiction, because it does not stick with the norms in terms of grammar, style, and prose. In other words, a grammar nazi would have a heart attack looking at just one page and the finished novel itself would have them jumping off a cliff. I have an English degree, focused in teaching high school grammar and literature, and I can, if I wanted to, sit down and write perfect grammar and recite grammar rules for hours on end... but you wouldn't know it to look at my novels.

This deliberate lack of perfect grammar is a style choice, and one that often results in many of my books receiving bad reviews with the reader saying "this was unedited!" No. None of my books has ever gone through fewer then 12 edits and most go through 17 or more edits.

If you are finding bad spelling and poor grammar in my books, believe me, I'm well aware it's there and it's there intentionally, on purpose. The reason being that all of my books are part of a long running series about the same set of characters. The primary POV character is an unreliable narrator. An opium and LSD addict, he often does not know up from down, reality from hallucination. He contradicts himself constantly, inconsistencies are overboard, stuff he sees happening around him may in fact be only a hallucination, but he can't tell and neither can the reader, and a talking cat is following him around writing down everything he does and says. His best friend/lover is illiterate, unable to read or write, and barely has a clear grasp on the English language, English not being his native tongue; he says things wrong, often not realizing it, saying one thing when he thought he was saying something else. The cat who is writing this down does not make a distinction and does not correct him, and thus the story is written by someone who is not an person and has a lingo of her own, while she is trying to write about a mentally unstable main character and his illiterate lover.

The grammar is not only deliberately bad, it is at times horrific, to the point of leaving the reader asking: "What does this even mean?" And again, this is intentional. The finished product is intended to read as though it were written by someone on LSD. The cat is a 4th wall breaking narrator, telling the story of a drug addict from the drug addict's point of view. It is a genre known as "Psychedelic Fantasy" and while popular in the 1970s when the series started, Psychedelic Fantasy is a genre rarely seen today.

So back to the topic of the process of writing and editing...

>>So, I have come across many people saying things like "the first draft is total shit" or something along those lines. They say they rewrite their story multiple times until it is 'perfect'. To me, this just seems like a case of bad planning.

I am one who does not believe the first draft is shit theory. I believe each first draft is different, even from a single author. Some drafts will be gold bricks vomited on the page and others will be just plain vomit. It depends on many factors, including the current level of stress and health the author is in at the time of writing. The more calm and relaxed and healthy a person is, the better the chances of a clean first draft that needs only minimal spelling/grammar/typo edits, even without an outline. That same author, when dealing with stress and sickness will struggle to get their draft polished even after multiple edits and with a good outline. No author always writes pure gold and no author always writes crap. Heck, you want to see how crappy a first draft can be, try writing a story when you have the flu! LOL! :P

With this in mind, it is my belief that how many drafts a novel goes through is a reflection of many things, including, but not limited to the author's skill level, their stress levels, and their current state of health. Even just being hungry because of skipping a meal while writing, can cause a change in levels of crappiness. Some people are affected by the weather and write better on sunny days or rainy days, then vice versa.

It's been my personal experience, that the more stressed I am, the more free-flow and neurotic my writing becomes. So for me, I don't think every first draft is shitty, and I do think, that under the right conditions, most authors can put out first drafts that are near publishable with only a minor edit. A also think MOST authors seem to write when they are stressed, such as being inspired to write after a break up with a boyfriend or the death of a grandparent or being told they have cancer or struggling with depression or whatever else... high stress is often cited, by many authors, as the trigger that inspires them to write, thus it is perfectly logical and reasonable to expect the resulting draft will be rushed and shitty and need a lot of work. Many authors (myself included) write through struggles as a way to deal with stress. Whereas if that same author writes from a well planned out draft and does it on there summer vacation, in a peaceful relaxed environment, there is no reason to think they couldn't write publishable first draft that doesn't need edits.

I do however feel that every novel, no matter how good the first draft is, can be improved by simply putting it away for a few months or even a year, and then rewriting it as you read it. Because after a year, you've had time to forget what you wrote and can now read it a bit more objectively with a bit less "this is perfect" bias that you had upon writing it. I do this and am constantly taken back by the reaction of: "What the hell did I write? How did I think this was good?" Every year, my work from the previous year, seems less good then I had thought it was when I finished it.

>>I have made a more-or-less complete outline from start to finish and am now busy writing it all out. Sometimes I expand upon a scene or add a new interaction between characters, but nothing big. It is far from being 'total shit', it just needs some careful editing here and there. So far, it seems completely unnecessary to me to create a second draft when I can just edit the bad parts out of my first one and make that into the final version.

I used to outline. Decades ago. I have many massive notebooks and binders full of hand written outlines, many over 100 pages long.

I don't do outlines anymore.

I found that I would waste months on end outlining and planning and outlining and plotting and outlining and worldbuilding and outlining some more... and it was great fun to do, I loved doing it, BUT... I'd get done outlining and be: "Okay, that's done, now what can I write?"

I can make some really amazing outlines, but that in itself became the problem. I made my outlines too good, and the act of turning the outline into a novel became a chore. It took me several years to figure out what the problem was too. I'd be all excited to write this novel, I'd plot and plan and write out these massive, highly detailed outlines and then I'd be bored out of my mind when it came time to write the thing.

It turns out, I'm something called "a discovery writer". I like the thrill of discovering the story, thus why I was so excited to to the research and planning and outlining. BUT, once I know the end of the story, once I know what happened and why, suddenly the thrill of the discovery is gone and I lose interest. Thus making an outline became the very reason I struggled to finish so many novels in that time period of my life.

I stopped writing outlines and BOOM, I suddenly had no trouble writing novels again. It's weird, too, because I had it in my head that I HAD to write outlines. I thought you couldn't write a novel without an outline, so I never even tried to work without an outline before that point.

Now, instead of outlining, I just free flow it. I'm a person of extremes too. I went overboard extreme with my outlines, filling them with hundreds of pages of details, that I really had no reason to include, but I detailed out all the little pointless details anyways, just because it was fun to do. There is so much joy for me in the creation process. Well, now that I've stopped outlining (I wrote my last outline in 2006 so it's now been 12 years since I last used an outline), my drafts have improved substantially. All those details I used to put in the outlines, I now put in the drafts instead.

Usually I have no idea what the plot of the story is or where the story will go or how the story will end. You remember those random scenes I mentioned earlier? Those quick handwritten pages that I later type up and start expanding? The process goes like this:

I take this random scene idea and I start asking questions about it:

• Why did he say this?
• How will this other character respond when he finds out?
• What would happen if he went forward with this but that happened to interrupt him along the way?
• What would happen if this person disagreed?
• What if it suddenly started raining/snowing while he was doing it?
• What is she thought he was doing it because of this when he was really doing it because of that?
• How would the result be different if he did it here instead of there?
• What if while he was doing this, that happened to mess up his plan?
• What will she say when she finds out he did that?
• etc...

I'll write and write and write and write, maybe 1,000 or 2,000 or more words, full free flow with no clue what direction it'll take. When I get to the end of the scene, I'll go back and read it, while tossing questions like the ones above at it. Next thing I know, I'll be writing the next scene. The question will have inspired me to toss another person or item or event into the end of that first scene, and I'll write it out to see where it goes. I'll write and write and write until I reach the result of that change. Then I'll start throwing around some more "What ifs?" Wat if it started snowing? So I'l write it snowing and see how the characters react. Wait, what if it had rained instead? I'll go back to where it started snowing, write a new version of that scene now with rain and see where it goes. Then I'll look at both scenes and determine which one better fit the way the story was going. I'll use one and save the other as an indea file to maybe be used in something else later.

I think of it as though I was reading a book. When I read a book, I'm on the edge of my seat wanting to know what happens next, so I keep turning the page and reading more to find out.

I write like that. I don't know what's going to happen next. It's the thrill of discovery, to write a scene and not know where it'll lead. I'm on the edge of my seat while I'm writing wondering: What's gonna happen next?

This is the same experience I felt while writing my outlines, but then after I finished the outline, it was like I had finished reading the book, so had no more desire to go back into it, thus I wouldn't write it.

But now without an outline, I get the novel written in a few days because I'm so excited to discover what is going to happen.

>>Do you guys often rewrite parts or even the whole of your story? Is your first draft really that bad compared to the final product? Personally, I prefer spending a lot of time on creating a good outline instead of meticulously rewriting the same chapters over and over.

You'll often hear me talk about revising and rewriting, but I think, what I call rewriting, may not be what most others would consider rewriting? Not sure. It seems to me, when I see people saying they are rewriting, that they are actively writing their story over again, and for me, that's not what I do.

When I revise a novel, it' not so much me writing it over, as it is me continuing to snowball ideas at the story.

After I finish writing a novel, I like to put it away for 6 months minimum, before going back to edit it. These first drafts are usually very short only 70k to 80k words, barely the size of the finished novel it'll become when published, with most novels of the series being 140k to 200k words and some reaching over 300k. I'll immediately move on to my next novel. As it takes me about 2 to 3 weeks to write a "first draft", I'll have written 5 to 8 more novels by the time I go back 6 months later to edit that first one. I've now had time to forget a lot of what I wrote in this particular novel.

Now it comes time to "re-write" the novel. My process is this:

I read the novel, and as I read it, I'm now thinking of the additional 6 or 7 new novels I've written for the series since writing this one I'm now editing. I'll realize "Wait... did I have him doing this in that one? But I have him doing that over here in this one instead. That's not right. He can't do both. Can he? I gotta change one of these."

I'm now off to read the novels already published, read the drafts written before the one I'm editing, read the drafts written after the one I'm editing, and am now writing new scenes for this draft, in order to match up the chronology and consistency of the series as a whole. I'm now looking for plot holes and lose ends to tie up. I'm looking for places where what he did in the already published volume 22 does not match up with the now being edited volume 122. I'm writing new scenes to fix these inconsistencies and making old story lines match up with new story lines.

Keep in mind that the series in question, was started in 1978, has 130+ novels already published, and has a grand total of 275 novels in the series already started, with me currently working on 81 volumes in various stages of completion. And the way I write this series, it'll likely pass 400+ novels published over the next couple of decades, seeing how I have no plans to ever stop writing it, am writing new novels (80k to 300k words each) at a rate of 10 to 12 a year (though I publish 3 to 4 a year), and will probably keep right on writing into my 90s.

As I am doing this consistency checking process, I'm also STILL asking those "What if?" questions and so, new scenes start being written into the story, often resulting in very dramatic changes in the story line. I consider the 70k first draft to be nothing but a bare bones skeleton, completely lacking in meat, and this process of writing new scenes to answer the "What ifs?" to be the process of fleshing out the story and putting meat on the bones. So in an essence the first draft was actually an outline written in story form, and it is now evolving into the true story that will go on to be published.

The editing process after this point, consists largely of spell checking, grammar correcting, and combing for typos. I'm currently using 3 different editing programs for this, but I used to have 7 different programs I was using. (I got a new computer and have not yet bought new versions of the remaining 4 programs.)

In the end my process is this:

• A first draft written in fast free flow, often written in a single weekend, that acts as an outline for the novel. (Done in EditPad7)
• A revision/2nd draft written in a slower, more well thought out manner, usually taking 2 or 3 or more months to complete. (Done in yWriter5)
• 3 to 7 edits via editing programs, counting as drafts 3 through 6 or 3 through 10. (Done in LibreOffice5)
• A editor taking a look and a final draft being made via those suggestions. (I used to use beta readers, but haven't in nearly a decade.) (Sent to the editor vis Google Docs)
• A manual eyeballing it while I format it for publication, edit. (Done in LibreOffice5)
• Order the printed proof copy, and do the final edit, red sharpie on printed page, then typing those changes into the final draft.

The end result is a grand total of 12 drafts being made of each novel from start to finish.

Anyways, there is it, my editing process.

I edit after.

I'm one of those people who loves editing. I find it very relaxing and peaceful, almost meditative you could say.

On the other hand I find writing to be very energizing. Thus I write myself into an energitize frenzy, then edit back into a state of calm again.

Weird, I know, but that how I do it.

Another Update for 2021, yep, putting this one at the bottom, no reason why, it's just here.

>>>First draft Vs Rewriting Do most people write a lengthy first draft and go from there or do they write a minimized first draft (30k+) and then rewrite the whole manuscript? Quite confused about it and deciding whether to switch methods (originally rewrite).

Me, I just write the story down as fast as I can, in a basic text doc so that none of the spellchecker red underlines show up to distract me. The goal is to get the full story idea out on paper. These usually end around 50k to 70k long. I save that file as "Story Title First Draft - today's date" and don't edit directly in it. Instead, now I open LibreOffice and copy the entire first draft and paste it into a doc file. I save this on as "Story Title 2 Draft - today's date but next year" Than I set it aside for a year and go work on something else. A year later, I open the doc file (not the txt file) and now I have the auto-spellcheck do it's thing. Than I read it and edit/rewrite as I read. This 2nd draft edit/rewrite usually takes a couple of days to a couple of weeks. When finished, I open a 3rd file (doc) and paste a copy of the 2nd draft into it, name it "Story Title 3 Draft" and put it aside for 2 or 3 months, than edit/rewrite the 3rd one and make a 4th one for editing a few months later, name it "Story Title 4 Draft" and so on, for however many times it takes the novel to feel "done".

Usually I end up with around 7 drafts before the story feels finished and polished. And most of my novels, though they start out 50k to 70k in the 1st draft, most of them are 120k to 230k by the time they reach publication (I'm writing door stopper brick sized Epic Length Fantasy so they are longer than most other genres. You'd expect fewer words in say Romance or Cozy Mysteries).

I never throw anything out or "fully delete" scenes/chapters either. If while editing I reach a point of thinking: "This scene/chapter has to go". Rather than delete it from the draft, I create yet another doc file, copy the whole thing paste it into the new file, save as "Story Title 2A Draft" save the "Story Title 2 Draft" file at the point where I stopped editing. Now pick up editing where I left of, now in "Story Title 2A Draft" and now I deleted the scene/chapter and keep on going. That way I have removed the scene/chapter from the story, but it's not gone forever, in case I decide in a later draft to put it back in, or in case I decide to use it in a different novel entirely.

I end up with a separate file for each draft, which I do because I teach writing lectures and workshops at conventions, while cosplaying characters from my novels, and I show attendees what each version of the draft looks like so they can see how much the manuscript changes during each step of the editing process.

Even though I publish several novels a year, which makes it seem like I write/edit the whole novel in only 3 months time, each novel actually has 3 to 4 years of writing/editing/rewriting to them, it's just that I have so many WiPs going that appears less time goes into each one than what actually does, because I can set the draft aside for a year, edit last year's draft, set it aside, edit draft from 2 years ago, set it aside, and so on. Very assembly line process and probably a method that will not be well suited to most writers. I usually have anywhere from 12 to 30 novels in various stages of editing at any given month, which is how I'm able to publish 3 to 6 novels a year. So even though it looks like I rush each novel with only 3 months of work to it, from start to finish it takes on average 3 years for me to take a novel from 1st draft to publication.

Before using this method I had tried several others: outlining, 13 steps, snowflake, etc, and each was okay, but none of them ever felt "right" for me personally, and I struggled quite a lot early on. It was several years of trying different methods before I found one that actually worked for me and it was kind of just years of trail and error before I settled into the routine I use now.

I would suggest, looking at all the methods everyone uses, try out each one, do a different method for each of your novels, and see which one works best for you. Not every method is going to work for every writer and it may take you 3 or 4 novels before you settle into a method that feels right for you.

>>>I finally finished the first draft to a horror short story. I'm thinking about what's a good time away from the project before coming back to it. How long do you guys wait? (if you do at all)

I think the time between drafts, should be whatever you're personally comfortable with, and it's going to be vastly different from one writer to the next.

Because I publish 2 to 3 stories a week, and 4 to 6 novels a year, there is often the misconception that the story was written, edited, and published in only 4 days (novel in 3 months), but this is extremely inaccurate. I've had people who never read my work contact me to say they would never read my stories, because "anything written and published 4 days later must be crap". They are completely clueless as to my writing/editing process, and the fact that 2 years of work go into each story. Just because a new story is published about every 4 days, does not mean it was written 4 days ago. In actuality, if I publish a story today May 21, 2021, it was likely written May 21, 2019, edited May 21, 2020.

Because I have so many ideas, I'm constantly writing. As soon as I finish a story I immediately jump into the next one.

Well, when it comes to how long do I wait between drafts: a full year.

Yep.

A year.

Maybe a bit long for others, but for me it works.

By the end of a year, I've written so many other stories that I've completely forgotten what I wrote a year ago and so now I'm able to open up the first draft and read it with the same "eyes" as one of my readers, and I'm able to get rid of a good 99% of the spelling/grammar/flow errors with only one round of edits, and publish straight from the 2nd draft.

But than, I'll set it aside for a second year.

Yep.

There are 2+ years between writing the first draft and the publication, even my super-short-shorts of only 10k words.

So, a story published May 21, 2021, was actually written in 2019, edited in 2020, and formatted & published in 2021 with a final proofread to catch any errors that still remain.

But, this year wait between edits method, I think would only work for others who like me are just bombarded with way to many ideas ad are constantly working on new projects every few days/weeks. If you've only got one or two pet projects that you are working on, you might not be able to distance yourself enough to wait 2 years or have enough other projects to fill up the time between drafts. 

I think, in the case of short stories, waiting a year would probably only work for career writers, who HAVE to publish weekly if they want to pay the bills, and probably wouldn't work for someone without a pre-established relationship with publishers. S if you are just getting started and still looking for publishers and/or don't have lots of story ideas to work with in between, maybe it'd be better to wait only a few weeks? 

But I also think there is no hard/fast rule about it. No right or wrong way/time. Some people write with fewer errors the first draft and can publish a week later. Others, like me, have a lot of spelling issues and can't immediately see them so need to have a very long waiting period. It's all about testing and seeing what works best for you personally. After you've edited a few stories, you'll start to get a feel for what works best for you.

>>>How long does a book typically take to go from final manuscript to publication? I usually see Goodreads reviews appear about 3-4 months before publication. But the final manuscript could have existed before then. So if a book is published on May 28, 2021, approximately when was it probably finished being written, on average?

It's going to be vastly different for every book an author writes, depending on huge variables and factors, like life/health/family/job.

Plus if it's self published, most authors are able to have the book in reader hands days after the last draft is finished, whereas if it's trade published, the average id 2 YEARS OR MORE from the time the author finished the last draft and gave it to the publishing house before the publishing house gets around to actually publishing it.

For me, personally:

The longest one took several years, about 6, maybe 7 years, I forget now, to go from first draft to being published.

The shortest took 7 days, to go from first draft to being published.

Both were around the same word count (about 115k).

The difference in time was because, for one, I was writing it between surgeries and doctor visits and relearning to walk and court cases and police investigations and FBI investigations because this book was being written just before my family was murdered and, so there was lots of life issues going that pushed finishing the book aside.

The shortest time, was only 6 months earlier, 6 months before my family was murdered and life went to shit, and the entire first draft written in a single sitting in one day. It was 47k words and written for the 50k in one day challenge. The next day I rewrote the whole thing, fleshing it out and adding an additionally 25k words. The 3rd rewrite the following 2 days added 17k words each day to it. It was edited the 5th day and edited a 2nd time the 6th day, adding more words each day during the edits. Ending at 114k words total (about 350 pages in the paperback edition). I formatted it the 7th day, made the cover in a about an hour, uploaded it to Kindle and CreateSpace and SmashWords and went on to be one of only 5 people who won the "7 Day Novel" contest challenge that year.

About a month later, I read the print version and I found huge amounts of errors (spelling, grammar, punctuation) and used that print copy to edit right on the pages, then went back to the doc file, made those edits, reuploaded the new file, notified my readers of the updated version so they could get the free revised version Amazon offered back than. 

>>>How long does it take you to write a first draft? Personally for me, it takes 3-4 months of writing everyday- or most days. Everyone has different spans of time to get their creative work done. We each lead different lives. So, how long does it take you?

The first draft takes about 3 days, ends between 40k to 70k and is the "full" story told beginning to end, as though someone was describing the story to someone else. 

I took secretarial typing in college, which requires typing 175 words per minute to graduate, but I'm a bit slower than that now outside of college, typing at only 91 words per minute average, but faster around 120 wpm when doing the first draft, so my typing speed when writing novels is around 5k words per hour and writing is my full time job, so it's straight up my typing all day and all night for 3 days, only stopping for naps, meals, and bathroom breaks; I usually average around 25k a day, and end with a 60k vomit draft after 3 days.

It's generally full of huge errors, lots of typos, grammar and spelling are a mess, and at this point, it's usually without dialogue, without scene descriptions, etc.. It's JUST the story itself, bare bones, nothing fleshed out.

In essence my first drafts are kind of an outline written in a story format, instead of an outline format. Basically it goes like this: I get an idea in my head, so I just write the full story idea down with as much detail as I can spur of the moment hash out, while I speed write it. My goal during the first/vomit draft stage is to just get the idea out on paper with as much detail as possible, before something distracts me and I forget the idea. So, the 1st draft is FAR from publishable and is a total mess, due to how fast I write it up.

I typically put it away for 2 to 3 years before I look at it again. The first edit, is usually just to go through a fix spelling and typos, than to do a full rewrite, fleshing out as I go, adding the dialogue and scene descriptions. This takes 2 to 3 months.

It gets put away again for another year or more, before it receives the major edit and rewrite where I work it into something publishable, and that can take 6 months or more to do as I slowly go through it line by line, diagraming each sentence, and reworking everything.

In the end, it usually takes 4 years+ to go from idea to published. I write an Epic Length Fantasy series, so the finished novel will be at minimum 115k words, unto 230k words, but most are in the range of 150k to 180k (and average 450 to 520 pages when published to paperback).

People often miss-assume that it takes under 2 months for me to go from idea to publishing because I publish 4 novels a year, most years, but, that output is just because I'm usually working on 10 or more novel drafts at any given time, so they are always in rotation and I end up with something ready to publish every few months, making it look like almost no time goes into the novel, when in fact, that novel will have been something I've been working on for several years.

>Once it's done you'll be rewriting the whole thing again.

This.

Each of my novels goes through 4 to 7 or more full re-writes before I ever feel they are good enough to hand over to an editor.

> I know it's necessary but does that not drain the vitality and magic out of the craft to some extent?

I actually have more fun rewriting than I do writing the first draft. For me, the first draft is more of a slog, so I write it vomit draft style as fast as possible to get it over with and move on to the fun part - editing and re-writing.

I think because, during the first draft, I'm still formulating where the story will go. But during the rewrite, I now know the full beginning, middle, and end, so now I know what I want each scene to be, and can spend time rewriting each one.

> (I mean everyone rewrites to some extent but it’s not like all authors write from scratch their whole book 5 times like some people here seem to believe), 

Every writer may not, but I certainly do. 

>When you feel like your writing is better in the latter half of your book, what do you do?

Re-write the full thing.

I never edit over each draft though. Each draft has its own file, that way I have copies of each edit/rewrite it goes through, just in case I remove scenes/chapters and later want to have them back. Plus I can compare how much it changed from 1st draft to publication.

I name the first draft "Title of Novel 1st draft". I put it away, for a year minimum, so I have time to forget what I wrote.

After writing the first draft, I create a new file, and name it "Title of Novel 1st edit". I paste the first draft into this file to do the first rough edit. At this point, I run it through several different spelling and grammar checkers, so that when I rewrite it I won't have to worry about those things slowing me down. 

Then I created the 3rd file and name it "Title of Novel 1st re-write". I paste the 1st edit version into it and, then, I open the file in EditPad or NoteBook and open LOTS of tabs (a 100 or more) creating a new tab for each page of the draft.

Now comes the first major rewrite. I take one page of the draft (200 to 500 words depending on the font, margins, etc), paste it into NotePad, and I make it my goal to rewrite this scene into at least a 1,000-word scene, without looking at the page before or after it for context. Completely rewrite the page. Then I paste the end result back into the 3rd draft. I repeat this for each page.

Most of my first drafts are 40k to 70k words long. But this full rewrite, turning each 350-word page into a 1,000-word scene, results in the 3rd draft now being around 150k words by the time it's done.

This gets put away for another year, the same way the first draft did.

A year later, I create another file "Title of Novel 2nd edit". Paste the 3rd draft into it. Like I did with the first draft, I run it through several different spelling and grammar checkers so that when I rewrite it I won't have to worry about those things slowing me down. 

Then I created the 5th file and name it "Title of Novel 2nd re-write". Paste the 4th draft into it. I create a 6th file  "Title of Novel 2nd re-write - copy". Here is where I now open the draft in 2 files side by side one on each monitor/computer screen, and now I do a full rewrite. Writing the entire novel beginning to end all over again. Basically looking at one and retyping it, now making changes for flow, etc. I end up editing both files at once, moving and combining stuff, between them.

This gets put away for another year. Yes... at a minimum by this point, 3 years have gone by since the first vomit draft was written.

The 7th file is USUALLY the last one, but sometimes there are more. The 7th one I name "Title of Novel - final edit". Paste the 6th one into it. This file gets run through 7 different spell checkers and grammar checkers then gets run through each of the 20+ ProWritingAid reports. Then I read the entire thing out loud on live stream (Twitch usually, YouTube sometimes) and reading it out loud, I find a TON of stuff that got overlooked. This is a major edit and massive rewrite, that takes 5 to 8 months of daily 5 hour live streams as I edit the final draft live with my readers helping. I usually get 3 to 4 pages edited per 5 hours of live stream, as we do a line-by-line dissection of the entire novels. This will be the biggest most intense re-write of all. (I've been doing these live stream edits with my viewers since 2004. 2021 is my 17th year of editing my novels on live stream.)

In the end, it takes each of my novels 4 years to go from 1st draft to publication, with a grueling edit and rewrite process that slaughters the draft ripping every inch of it apart scene by scene, line by line. And because of this, the feeling that it was weaker at the beginning, is totally obliterated.

By saving every version of the draft in a separate file, I'm able to go back and compare the first draft to the finished paperback, and the differences are often astounding, with how vastly different they are. Huge changes get made during each rewrite, to the point that some finished chapters bear no resemblance to their first draft versions.

>I just want to know if anyone else feels something similar and how you deal with it—especially considering how important a strong opening is.

This statement, tells me that you are not in the habit of rewriting your drafts or if this is your first novel, you are unaware of how important rewriting is.

Know that, if you plan to publish, your draft will NEED to go through 3 or 4 edits and as many rewrites... and yes an edit is different from a rewrite. One edits grammar and spelling, the other completely rewrites the entire story. 

No one who publishes high-quality work, did so, by publishing their first draft after just a spelling/grammar edit.

With this in mind, I would suggest not worrying about your first draft's weak beginning, because, after you rewrite your novel, your 2nd draft will be starkly different from the 1st, and after you rewrite it again, the 3rd draft will be different from the 2nd.

Think of it as a rough dirty pebble you found in your driveway. You take that pebble and put it in a rock tumbler with a large grit to chip away the dirt and grime. Then you run the tumbler with a finer grit to smooth out the cracks. Then you run the tumbler with an even finer grit to make the pebble nice round. Finally, you run the tumbler with a super fine grit to get a nice fine super shiny polish on the stone. Now you put the stone in a setting and what started out as a rough dirty ugly pebble in your driveway is now a beautiful gemstone necklace you are proud to wear.

Novel writing is like that. Your first draft is that dirty, rough, ugly pebble. Each rewrite chips away the rough parts and smooths out the edges. With enough rewrites, you'll end up with a shiny gem worth putting a pretty cover on and publishing.

So, don't worry about flaws and weaknesses you are finding in your first draft. You are 4 or 5 rewrites away from it being publishable anyways, and you'll sort out the flaws and weaknesses during those revisions.

>I noticed that the first two chapters don’t feel as smooth

Same.

With me, I noticed every novel, the first half needs tons of editing while the last half, not so much. I think it's because at the beginning I don't have a clear direction where the story was going, and am still experimenting with "what if...?" but by the latter half of the novel the story has started to fully form better and I know where it is going.

End result is the first half of every novel's first draft is usually full of plot holes and loose threads that need major fixing and rewriting.

>>>Hiya! So I recently finished my first novel and am now looking to edit my work since I'm working on a deadline. I need with a couple of things I hope you don't mind me asking:

>>>Characters texting. I can't seem to write this without it sticking out, any tips on how to make it flow with the plot?

>>>Time skips. I have a lot of these (although very small) and i want to decrease them, was wondering what's the best way.

>>>Editing tips in general

>>>Characters texting. I can't seem to write this without it sticking out, any tips on how to make it flow with the plot?

I've never written texting, due to time period of my novels and short stories all being pre-1800s, but if I were to write a novel with a text, I think I'd do it as either part of dialogue (if the character was reading the text out loud) or part of internal monologue (if the character was silently reading the text)

For example:

>"So, then I said was... oh wait, I got a text." She quickly checked her phone, than started yelling. "Will you look at that! *'Text me now.'* Doesn't she know I'm busy?"

>She showed me the message. It was from her mom. *TEXT ME NOW!* It said in all caps. Must be important.

>>>Time skips. I have a lot of these (although very small) and i want to decrease them, was wondering what's the best way.

I do this a lot. What I do is type a tilde design and than say how much time passed, than keep on going with the next scene. 

It looks like this:

>The MC finishes doing things in this last sentence of the paragraph.

>~o0o~

>Three days later...

>The first paragraph of the next scene continues the story.

>>>Editing tips in general

Before I send my final draft to be edited by others, I edit it first in LibreOffice with it's spell checker/grammar checker. I like to use LibreOffice for the final formatting of my drafts as well, because it has so much editability in the settings, with regards to page margins, paragraph indents, page numbers, spacing, fonts, etc. But the spell checker and grammar editor that comes with it, is one of the best out there. It'll get most of your typos, misspellings, and punctuation issues. It's free. https://www.libreoffice.org/

Than I run it through Hemmingway App. But I ignore most of it's advice (adverbs, adjectives, and passive voice - I don't edit for those, because the series I write is a very slow paced, laid back, hippie vibe, with an MC who is usually mellowed out of opium, LSD, hashish, and absinthe, and he's the PoV narrating character, so both his dialogue and the bulk of the narrative is deliberately written in passive voice with a lot of added adverb wordiness to slow the reader down to the MCs same chill pace, thus, I don't edit to remove adverbs, adjectives, or passive voice, and simply ignore those sections in the Hemmingway App.) 

However, I do frequently have issues where I write very long run-on and compound sentence that average 70 to 120 words per sentence, and the Hemingway App has 2 editing features, one called "hard to read sentences" (the yellow highlights) and the other called "very hard to read sentences" (red highlights), and because it highlights these sentences in bright yellow or red, I'm able to quickly find them and edit them.  

So, for me, personally, the Hemmingway App is the best editing software for fixing the hard to read sentence issue. If that is a thing you struggle with, I highly recommend it.

Also, if you actually wanted to remove adverbs and change passive voice to active voice, (most authors do want to remove/change them) it highlights those in bright blue, purple, and green, making it super easy to find and fix those issues.

While it doesn't fix things like spelling, typos, and the bulk of grammar issues, and it doesn't tell you how to fix the issues it highlights, it's great for simply highlighting common flaws that trip up flow and affect readability.

It's free as well. https://hemingwayapp.com/

Next I run it through Grammar Coach by Dictionary dot com.

This one is not that great and it frequently has HUGE grammar errors in it, so definitely don't rely on it 100% because often the suggestions it gives you are outright bad grammar. 

However, I have trouble with commonly repeating simple words, due to American English not being my native language. And this program has a great "Thesaurus swap" feature. It's the best Thesaurus feature of any editing app out there. 

This app bugs out and crashes at around 2,000 words, so I can't run the whole novel at once and just put 2 pages at a time in.

This one has a paid subscription version, but I've never used it, so I'm not sure wat it does different from the free version. I've only ever used the free version. It has so many hugely bad grammar errors in it, that I didn't feel it was worth paying to upgrade it. https://www.thesaurus.com/grammarcoach

Next I run it through ProWritingAid. This can take 2 or 3 months to do, as I run 4 pages at a time through it and it has 20+ different sections to run it through, and I run it through each one.

As with HemingwayApp I don't change everything it recommends I change, because again, for this particular series I write, I WANT the passive voice and excessive adverbs and vague verbs, as a style choice due to the very mellowed out hippy-like elf who is the MC. 

Also, because the MC is a very sensory driven, emotional person who likes to get flowery in his monologuing, I like to use the sensory checker, alliteration checker, overused words checker, repetition checker, and  transition checker, to look for things these sections highlight and than ADD MORE of them instead of removing/changing them. I have a goal of 10 of each type of sensory word every 500 words (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and so I use this checker to find where my sensory words are, and than add lots more in the places where none show up. 

I check all of the MC's spoken dialogue and internal monologue for alliteration and repetition, and make sure to add both to every sentence he says that doesn't have them.

I used the free version for several years. But I eventually upgraded to the paid version because the free version only lets you edit 500 words to a time and I write epic length Fantasy that averages 115k to 175k words per volume and it got tedious editing them 500 words to a time. But otherwise there is very little difference between the free and paid versions. https://prowritingaid.com/

Next I run it through Article Spinner.  It has different settings:  1) HUMAN  2) AI ROBOT  3) REMOVE PLAGIARISM  4) FIX GRAMMAR  5) FIX SENTENCE STRUCTURE 6) AI Paraphraser Pastel 7) AI Paraphraser Vibrant 8) AI Paraphraser Extreme 9) Text Summarizer

Now, a warning about this program: it is NOT an editing program and is one of the shadiest software programs ever invented. What it was created to do was: you steal an article off a blog, paste it into this program, run it through each of the 5 settings, and it spits out a "original article" that is the exact same article reworded. Yep - it's the infamous plagiarism program that is used by all those shady blogs that steal content from other bloggers and spins those articles, that come out reading horrific.

For example:

>I'm going to type a sample block of text for you to read, so that you can see what happens when you take this segment of words and put them into the article spinner. It gives you things that you would never have expected to see. Some times it rewords it to sound better than how you originally wrote it and other times it spits out the most utterly ridiculous bull crap you ever saw. 

>Especially when you are writing fantasy genres and talking about things like elves and wizards and dragons and gnomes. You will see what I mean when you see what it decides to do with this text here right now. It likes to change things like animals and birds to other words. So chickens cross the road to get to the other side and find out that the egg got there first, causing wishes to become horses. Yeah. Watch what that turns into. 

>Now I'll give the article spinner a section from one of my novels. This scene comes from the novel titled BoomFuzzy, from volume three of The Adventures of Quaraun the Insane.

>But this is why I run my novels through it. You see, when it rewrites the sentences and paragraphs, often the mistakes it adds are so outrageous that it allows me to see where my own errors were in my writing. Spinning my novel drafts through this shady program, has caused me to see flaws in my writing that I never would have noticed otherwise. Because of this, I find the article spinner program to be invaluable for the rewriting part of editing my novels.

So... yeah... did you see what it did? It took my sample of 3 paragraphs explaining what it does, and spit them out reworded 9 different ways. Like I said, it allows you to see your manuscript in a different light and inadvertently causes you to see things that need fixing, that you simply never would have seen in a standard spell checker or grammar editor program. I love article spinner for this, because it has made me so much better at finding my own flaws in my drafts.

Watch out though, this one is on an ad heavy website. There are 7 ads on the screen at any given time. It's really annoying.  I use Chrome browser settings to open Chrome Task Manager and have it close the ads via closing the "sub frames". If you don't use Chrome browser, you'll definitely want to have some sort of ad block program before opening this website. https://aiarticlespinner.co/

I follow this process for each rewrite of the manuscript as well. Usually I have 5 to 7 drafts per novel, and so I end up running the manuscript through each of those apps/programs 5 to 7 times before I send the draft out to human editors and beta readers.

>>>Why do most beta readers never respond back?

>>>I get it that reading can be time consuming, but it seems like most people who volunteer for beta reading never respond back. Not even when you're only sending them a few sample chapters rather than the whole thing.

>>>One possibility that comes to mind is that some did not like what they saw, but weren't willing to share negative feedback. Yet I've had others give me possitive feedback, so I don't think my work is terrible enough for that to be a likely possibility. Or at least not the main reason.

>>>Is it merely normal that most people who offer to beta read don't respond back?

I think the issue here may be that you sent it to people CLAIMING they were beta readers but they were not ACTUALLY beta readers?

If they were ACTUAL Beta Readers, than you can (and should) report them to the Better Business Bureau (you can file a complaint here: https://www.bbb.org )  and file a lawsuit to get your money back. Considering Beta Readers are one of the biggest amounts of money you will spend on writing your novel, you will find yourself quickly in heaps of debt if you run into this issue too frequently.

Do know that there is a DRAMATIC difference between an ACTUAL beta reader (the career) and random forum users you meet online who CALL themselves beta readers without knowing what the term means or that it's an actual professional career.

A REAL beta reader is going to charge on average $50 an hr and most authors plan on budgeting $2,000 to hire 4 beta readers. Figuring that it takes about 10 hours to read the book and write the report up, and most pro-beta readers charge $50 an hr = you can expect to pay roughly $500 per beta reader and generally speaking having 4 beta readers is best, thus the standard industry practice is to plan on spending $2,000 per novel to have it beta read. 

>>>Is it merely normal that most people who offer to beta read don't respond back?

Beta Readers DO NOT offer to Beta Read.

Again, there is a DRAMATIC difference between an ACTUAL beta reader (the career) and random forum users you meet online who CALL themselves beta readers without knowing what the term means or that it's an actual professional career.

A real Beta Reader will have a website and an application form for you to fill out. They will want to see your resume and portfolio. Usually you will need to submit (via actual post office mail, not email) 2 to 4 of your previously published books (ACTUAL books aka paperbacks or hardcovers, NOT eBooks) for them to read your work to decide if you write the type of novels and short stories they work with.

Beta readers NEVER read chapters, drafts sent by email, or stacks of paper printed up. You MUST have the book already in the pre-publication typeset stage, aka ALREADY PRINTED UP IN PAPERBACK FORMAT, aka the PROOF copy, which the publisher will send you a year or so before publication if trade pubbing or you can have printed up from a local copy shop in your town if self-pubbing.

While reading your proof copy, they will write with red China-ink pencil right in the books itself. (proof copies have wide untrimmed margins and are about one inch larger on all sides than the finished paperback that goes to press. They will write in your book USING ACTUAL EDITOR'S MARKS and SHORTHAND, so make sure you know how to read both (yes, BEFORE you hire a beta reader you ARE going to have to learn not 1, but 2 new languages), because if you don't know how to read them, what you get back is going to look like utter gibberish that a 2 year old scrawled across the pages.

Additionally they will type up a report. Yes, an actual book report, like what you wrote in high school. The full 10 page classic book report with a 3 page character breakdown a 3 page story break down and a final page opinion sum up. Beta Reading IS the job you are training for with every book report your high school teacher made you write.

They will schedule a SINGLE DAY of the week to devote to your book, and read it in a 9 to 5 office setting, write editors marks and short hand notes all over the book as they read, they WILL being editing grammar errors, spelling errors, typos, making notes of plot holes and issues with characters. The average beta reader can read a full 100k word novel in about 5 hours. They usually plan a 10 hour time slot spaced over 2 days. 5 hours to read on day 1, 5 hours 1 re-read and write the report on day 2. If they go over 10 hours, you'll be charged for those hours, so your $50 an hour fee, could go over $500. Make sure you plan for that. Overnight shipping is often included, so, you WILL receive your proof copy and the 10 page report back within 48 hours of their reading it.

Know that Beta Readers are trained editors who are usually also in-house copy editors and/or line editors of big house publishers (the big, big, big publishing houses - think the Random Penguin Houses type), they often have Master's Degrees in journalism and/or teaching high school English, and they can spot a grammar error from a mile away.

Keep in mind that people who will tell you online that Beta Readers don't edit your work or say that Beta Readers are volunteers doing work for free, DO NOT KNOW what a Beta Reader is.

Friends, family, and random strangers from the internet reading your work, ARE NOT Beta Readers. They are "peer critics" offering feedback on what they read. They are no different from average people writing Amazon book reviews, and likely know nothing about editing, grammar, plot flow, building characters, or story structure, and will only give you a look at what you can expect to see general public write in reviews, but will NOT help you to actually improve your work and get it ready for publication the way a Beta Reader will.

These people are NOT going to refuse to reply. You paid them $500 or more to make your draft bleed red and they are going to eviscerate your work with brutal abandon. 

Beta Readers are NOT going to refuse to reply because they are scared of giving bad feedback or because they couldn't find anything good to say. **No Beta Reader worth his salt is EVER going to give you positive feedback.** Authors seeking positive feedback really don't want to seek out Beta Readers. Positive feedback is not their job. It is NOT their job to enjoy the read. They will still read it even if they hate it, find it boring, or even if your grammar is so bad it's nearly illiterate. They WILL read to the end, because it's what you paid them to do.

**The feedback from a Beta Reader WILL ALWAYS BE negative - because looking for flaws in your work is their job.** You DID pay them to LOOK for flaws and tell you where they are, so they WILL rip your baby apart and tell you EVERYTHING that is wrong with it. It is NOT a Beta Reader's job to pat you on the back and tell you your story is great. It is their job to look for every error they can find and highlight it in bright red ink, in order to help you rewrite your work to the best it can be BEFORE you send it out to an editor to be edited. A beta reader is not your yes man. They will NOT tell you it's good. They will NOT sing your praises. They WILL be merciless and brutal with the negative feedback, because it's what you paid them to do.

>>>Is it merely normal that most people who offer to beta read don't respond back?

Perhaps, it would help, if before you send them your work, you ask them what THEY think a Beta Reader is and does, that would help weed out the people who just want a free book or just want to pat you on the back and be your yes man?

If someone offered to read your work and tell you what they think, they are NOT a Beta Reader. They are someone who has no clue what the career of being a beta reader is, probably didn't even know Beta Reading was a career, and was just looking to bum a free book off an unsuspecting author. They have no intention of telling you how the book was or helping you make it the best it ca be, because they just wanted to get a free book and once you sent the your draft, they got that and have no more need for you. And unfortunately, they exist in droves on the internet, scurrying around looking for the next author they can scam a book out of. 

Now, that's not to say everyone you meet online is going to be like that.

Are there good free/volunteer beta readers out there? Sure there are. There are plenty of people online who really do want to help authors out and are willing to Beta Read for free or very cheap. Some of them are really good at it too. The problem is sifting through the chaff to find them, because online free Beta Readers is a place where the bad far out number the good. So when you do find a good one, keep contact with them, and remember to have them on hand for your next book.

I have personally found that just paying a pro-level beta reader is overall better than sifting through the internet looking for the 1 or 2 gems in the rough. Why? Time sink. It takes way too much of my time to scourer the internet searching for a few good beta readers lost in a shuffle of so many bad beta readers. Why waste my time searching for free or cheap beta readers, when I could just pay a pro-reader and get back to writing.

And yes, I understand money is an issue. The big dogs are expensive. But, a few years ago, I found a great alternative, that worked well for me. A local community college, which has a better than average English degree program, and has several rather famous authors on staff, has a very high rate of students who want to get a writing degree because they want to be the next Stephen King. So, they are also more than willing to beta read for extra credit in the honours program of the school. So, they get to read my work before it gets published, they write up reports of it as homework assignments, and a week later after they get it back from the teacher, they send it to me. Takes longer, because it has to be graded by the teacher before they can hand it over to me, but, I get my work beta read for free and they get extra credit towards their degree.

I highly recommend that if you have a community college in your area, that you head to the English department, ask to talk with a few teachers/professors/adjunct authors and see if they are willing to set up a program from students to earn extra/honours/vocational credit towards their degrees by beta reading. Though, you might want to already have a few books published and be a local author willing to come into class and talk to the students as a "special guest" 1 class per semester. The school might not want to do it if you are new/unpublished yet.

>>>I heard from a published author that publishers prefer books on the shorter side during the pandemic, due to the cost of printing and mainly due to limited resources. Is this the case?

No. 

Not for Big House press it isn't. 

• * Tor still asks for 120k minimum up to 200k, 

• * Baen still asks for 180k minimum up to 230k, 

• * Zebra still asks for 135k minimum up to 300k.

All 3 of them say if you send anything under 100k they are going to toss it in the paper shredder unread, because 120k is barest minimum and bordering on too short.

I just checked their websites, and those are the numbers they got listed right now July 13, 2021.

Just go to the publisher websites and read their submission guidelines. 2021 is actually seeing requests for LONGER works, not shorter.

In fact, near as I can tell the ONLY publishers going smaller word counts are the Indie Press publishers.

I don't know why so many writers are running around saying publishers want less words, because, no big house publisher is saying they want shorter, that for sure. All you have to do is look at the publisher guidelines posted right on their own websites to find out they are NOT asking for shorter works.

>>>My question to the group is whether or not there is better advise for writers who find themselves with a 150k+ draft?

Yeah there is. It's called, look at some REAL books. Most trade books ARE +150k words. Only in the world of self-pubbed Kindle ebooks do you see skinny books with no meat on the pages.

Just because everyone SAYS big house pubs want under 90k, doesn't mean they ACTUALLY want that. Look at the submission guidelines of big house publishers. You'll see many of them outright say don't send them anything under 120k and stick closer to 180k. Yeah. 30k MORE than 150k.

My question to the people telling them to cut it in half would be: **Why the hell are they all so clueless as to how long MOST trade published books ACTUALLY are?**

Look at the word counts of trade pubbed Fantasy: Sword of Shanara, Lord of the Rings, Mists of Avalon, Dragon Riders of Pern, Lord Valentine, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, Legend of Drizzt, The Witcher, most of those books have 10+ volumes in the series and each volume is 150k to 230k EACH volume. Most of those series is a single story that spans 2 million to 8 million or more words, divided across 10+ books of +150k.

You can tell, the commenters who are neither writers nor readers of the Epic Fantasy genre when they say 150K draft is too long. No. It's NOT. 150k is bordering on too short in the Epic Fantasy genre. Most people saying they wrote 150k draft, usually they say it's the Epic Fantasy genre, so they ARE in the expected word count that publishing houses are looking for.

I'm sorry, but, commenters telling someone to cut a 150k Epic Fantasy draft in half, REALLY don't know the genre at all.

Sure a lot of genres want smaller word counts. That's true. Westerns, Medical Drama, most Horror, most none-Paranormal YA/NA, those genres do want you to stay around 90k. If that is what the question asker wrote, well, editing is the answer.

I worked as an editor in chief for 16 years. I've seen a lot of manuscripts in my days. Most have the same issue: Long run on passive voice sentences, that could easily be cut down into 3 or 4 easier to read active voice sentences.

USUALLY most writers can remove 10k or more words, without changing the story at all, simply by doing this:

Use find replace to make the following changes:

• * change ", and" to "." then capitalize first word after "and"

• * change ", yet" to "." then capitalize first word after "yet"

• * change ", but" to "." then capitalize first word after "but"

• * change ", however" to "." then capitalize first word after "however"

• * look for 2-word or 3-word phrases that you can change into a better single word: for example: change "similar to" to "like", change "obediently obeyed" to "obeyed", change "prior to" to "before", change "after that" to "afterwards", change "being bullied" to "bullied", change "way bigger" to "bigger", etc - note that these phrases often contain "to", "that", "was", "be", "being", "were", and "-ly", so search for those and you'll find a lot you can change to one better word.

• * remove ALL of the following words: very, rather, instead, supposedly, suddenly, actually, literally, nearly, simply, just, utterly, elaborately, starkly, that, really, fully, barely, hardly, hardly ever, permanently, indefinably, exotically, etc.

• * remove "And/But/Yet/However" from the start of every sentence then capitalize first word after "And/But/Yet/However"

THOSE are the types of changes editors want when they say something like: "good story, great characters, I like it; tighten up your text and resubmit it".

Those things listed above, THAT is what "tightening your text" means. It doesn't mean cut out scenes, it means, reword those scenes to fewer words, to make them read better.

Yeah. For most writers, that is all you have to do to remove 10kor more words from your novel, without making one single change to the story.

To every body reading this right now, go to your current draft, and try that right now. You'll be amazed, both in how many words you remove AND in how much easier it'll be to read your story, without changing or removing a single scene, sentence, or chapter.

In my experience, being an editor for Horror/Fantasy/Sci-Fi for 16 years, most writers use more words than they need to. They often can say things better with fewer words.

For example:

This:

>>>MC made it back to his village without further incident, but when he arrived, his father was less then happy to see his son dressed in a dress and looking like a daughter instead of a son and immediately began arguing with him, and thus MC never got a chance to mention his encounter with the primary villain or inform the village that the villain's army was travelling only two days outside from the village.

75 words and difficult to read.

Can be edited down to this:

>>>MC arrived at his village without further incident. His father was unhappy to see his son dressed in a dress, looking like a daughter instead of a son. They began arguing. Because of this, MC never mentioned his encounter with the primary villain. Nor informed him, the villain's army was two days outside from the village.

56 words and easier to read.

...without changing the scene or the story, at all.

It really does boil down to: if you know good grammar skills, you'll write better stories with fewer words and be understood better too.

So, yeah, just buy a few high school Grammar & Composition textbooks and spend a few months reading every word and doing all the exercises. It'll do wonders to tighten up the over wordiness issue that many authors suffer from.

And remember, in most standard paperbacks, 150k words is ONLY 300 pages!

A 500+page book is also a +200k word story, and when you start looking around at the new releases in the Fantasy, Historical Romance, the 50 Shade Knock Off genre, Paranormal Romance, War Story genre, Women's Lit genre, and most YA novels, you'll also notice that NONE of them is self published because big box brick and mortar book stores don't shelve self-publishers that's why you don't see self-pubbed books in the real world of actual trade market paperbacks, and you'll also notice a good 80%+ of those books in the above listed genres have page counts of 400+ pages, meaning not one of them has FEWER than 150k words, and most have upwards of 180k words.

You can tell a person who only reads self-pubbed kindle e-editions and never saw a mass-market paperback  in an actual bookstore, by what they think the average word count of books is.

Heck, all you have to do is grab yourself a copy of The writer's Market and start reading what trade publishers WANT to see 150k to 180k is the average requested manuscript size more than 90% of big house publishers ask for.

Many Stephen King books are +300k words.

EACH volume of Harry Potter and also the Witcher is between 180k to 230k words

In the past 50 years I've published more than 300 novels, 138 of them for a single series, and the shortest novel I ever wrote was 115k, with most of them being 150k to 180k and often considered TOO SHORT by most the big Random Penguin House type publishers.

Zebra won't even look at anything under 180k for their Historical Romance line (aka The Fabio Bodice Rippers) and prefers +200k

The difference between Fantasy and Epic Fantasy is the LENGTH of the novel, NOT the topic. Fantasy is any Fantasy novel UNDER 150k while EPIC Fantasy is anything OVER 150k and most big house publishers of Epic Fantasy REQUEST +180k

Want to read 80k light novels or long novellas? Get yourself a Harlequin subscription. Everyone of their slim little itty bitty short 100 page reads is EXACTLY 82k words. Also the Cozies (Think those little itty bitty skinny, not thick enough to be a novel, Agatha Christie type Murder Mysteries) are in the 80k range.

You want to read a 50k word book? Head to the middle grade chapter books, Read Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Choose Your Own Adventures or Bobbsey Twins.

Want 20k word book: go to the grade 2 to 4 early/easy reader section. Grab yourself some GooseBumps and Bailey School Kids.

There's some word count perspective for you.

A LOT of the people on Reddit's many writing subreddits give really bad advice, that does more harm to new/young writers, largely because a good +80% of the commenters are NOT published authors, have no intention of being published authors, and don't know heads or tails of how the actual publishing industry works.

Unless that advice is coming for a TOR in-house editor, reading your draft and wants to publish it, the advice to cut a 150k draft in half is REALLY bad advice. And in most cases, it's writing advice from people who don't have writing careers and don't have any real concept of how novel writing works.

Now, that's not to say they don't mean well. I think in most cases, they don't know what to say, they want to help the question asker, and they've seen so many others saying "cut the book in half and publish it as 2/3 volumes" that they assume it MUST be good advice if so many others said it, so they just parrot that advice without really knowing how improbable that advice really is.

When all is said and done, I think the writer who is looking to Reddit or any other online place for advice only a publisher should be giving them, probably doesn't know how the publishing industry works and probably,, has bigger issues (like plot and character development) to worry about, than their word counts.

In the end, if the story is good, the plot flows well, the characters are engaging and well developed, most publishers will work with you to get the book published no matter how many words too long or too short the novel is. When it comes to trade publishing, story, plot, and characters are going to trump word counts every time.

Writers SHOULD be worrying about developing good characters and telling a great story, first and foremost. Word counts are far easier to fix than plot holes and flat characters are.

What do you want to become? 
What did you do today to step closer to that goal?
Whatever you do, be your best at it!
And remember to have yourself a great and wonderfully glorious day!

~EK
EelKat.com
pinterest.com/eelkat/

By EelKat Wendy C Allen

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the destruction of my farm, and the illegal selling of half of my land to Colliard, you shall lose your land.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in my being homeless since 2006 - YES, I AM still homeless in 2023, you shall become homeless.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the backhoe driving over my house, you shall lose your house.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in my car being cut in half, you shall lose your car.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in my becoming crippled, you shall lose your health.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the murder of my son, your child shall die an equally horrible death. If you haven't got a child to lose, it will be a brother or sister or parents or spouse or whomever you love the most, and that you should know it was this curse which you brought upon yourself that killed them, they will die on exactly the 7 year anniversary of the very first time, you mocked the death of my child.

Evil men go out of their way to try to drive a person to suicide.

Are you an evil man?

Are you sure you're not?

How many people have YOUR hate filled words killed?

Next time you go to do a mean thing to a fellow human, stop and really think about the consequences of your actions.

Did you ever notice how every one has a story to tell about me, yet not one of them ever speaks the truth?

What lies has YOUR gossiping tongue spread about me?

Did you know...

October 16, 2006, bomb blew up my house because of YOUR lies.

August 8, 2013, the house which replaced the one the bomb blew up, was driven over by a backhoe.

November 14, 2013, my 8 month old infant son was murdered because of your lies.

November 14, 2013, I was beaten up, paralized for 5 months, spent 18 weeks relearning to walk, I'm now crippled for the rest of my life, because of YOUR lies.

Are you proud of what you have done?

Enjoy your eternity in Hell. You earned it. You've certainly worked hard for it.

~EelKat

If you have any information about any of these events, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

Update: November 12, 2023

Two days is the 10 year anniversary of the murder of my 8 month old son. The killer has not been found yet. Old Orchard Beach, Maine Police at 207-935-4911 and Portland Maine FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322 are investigating the murder of my son so, if you have any information, please give it to them. https://www.eelkat.com/Never-Forget.html

UPDATE to add answer to question:

No. I am legally blind. I have been since I was 4 years old. I can not see what she looks like. I go by sound of voice and body smell to identify people. For what someone looks like I have to go by what others tell me. Like I said, I've never seen the woman who attacks, as she clearly knows I am legally blind and stays over 4 feet away from me. 

A person has to be closer than four feet from me in order for me to even make out the blur outline of their body shape/height/weight. But in order for ne to see their face they must have their face closer the EIGHT INCHES.

It's why I CAN identify the Claire woman and the Kendra woman who murdered my son, if anyone ever finds them and gets them in a line-up, I would be able to pick them out, but why I can not identify this weird crazy woman who shows up at the Biddeford apartment and stand yelling on the front porch and killed my dog Mickey in June 2023, and tried to kill me by poisoning my pizza at Round 1, while running around the restaurant screaming the same way she does here.

I can identify her voice and her laugh and her smell, its a very "Minnie Mouse type" high pitch shrieking with a megaphone style booming cackle laugh. And she smells really strong of alcohol drinks but I don't know what type as I am a Mormon and I don't know them. She also has a weird "rotting cat pee mixed with burned cotton candy smell" to her, which I am told by police, sounds like I am trying to describe a mix of "crack and weed" which the police said is some type of drug, but again, I'm a Mormon so I do not know those things. According to witnesses she is very fat, According to both my mother and my father she is well over 300lbs. Around twenty different people said she has "Shirley Temple Sausage curls" hair, while nearly a dozen other people said she has red curly hair, and several more people described her with straight purple hair, while some described her as wearing a "pulp fiction uma thurman wig".

In total well over a hundred people have come forward citing that she shows up on their porch and starts yell at them, and always starts out with some kind of "I got to warn you about EelKat and her demons" rant. They always describe her as "fat", "morbidly obeses", some say "200lbs" others say "300lbs". Some say she is in her 30s others say she is in her 40s. None of them know who she is, they all say she is a total stranger to them and they also all say, they had no idea who I was either.

They come to my apartment, they said, to tell me what she is doing, each of them saying they found out where I was because she told them my address, and they came over to tell me that she was doxxing my family. These people are always citing that they live in the Cutt St/Main street/May St/South St area, all of them saying they live within 3 or 4 blocks of me and that she walks to their buildings, they never see a car. My Biddeford apartment is 409 Main Street and she has shown up here daily from November 21, 2021 (the same day Etiole was shot; he says by her) until May 17, 2022. After May 2022, she showed up every holiday and every weekend, but no longer every day. 

Today is the 12th of November 2023 and she has already been here 4 times this month. At the same time, people around the Portland Ave and Cascade area of Old Orchard, are also arriving saying the same things, but about a man. They cite a white haired man, very skinny, rather short, around 5'6", around 70, is going driveway to driveway, parking a big Power Wagon sized Dodge Ram pickup truck across their driveway, then getting out, waving a rifle over his head, and yell up at their house ALSO saying he is there to "warn you about EelKat and her aliens". 

The two are believed to be grandfather/granddaughter, and FBI suspects they are the husband and granddaughter of the mystery "Claire" woman who murdered my son. They believe, that the homeless man who was murdered November 19, 2021, DID in fact know who the "Claire" woman who murdered my son was, and they believe this white haired man and woman who screams from porches are the ones who killed the homeless man, seeing how, he showed up on the 7 year anniversary of my son's murder, asking for the FBI phone number, claiming he knew who the woman who murdered my son was, but 5 days later he was murdered before he got a chance to talk to the FBI (the federal building in Portland was closed for the holiday week and the homeless man died before they reopened).

These 2, the white haired man and younger woman both showed up November 21, 2021, 2 days after the November 19, 2021 murder of the homeless man, who was murdered in the backyard of my Biddeford apartment, by the way, that week our building was yellow taped and crawling with police, that's why they were picking up the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of chopped up pieces of the homeless man, which took them 3 days to find all of him. The FBI believes the homeless man was killed by someone who did not want him to identify my son's murderer... this homeless man's death is WHY my son's cold case, was reopened and the FBI once again here asking all the neighbors for leads. 

The FBI believes that the reason these two are hyper going from house to house all around me (I have 2 addresses: 409 Main Street Biddeford and 146 Portland Ave, Old Orcharch; and they are going up and down both streets and all side streets off of both streets), trying to spread slanderous rumors about me, most of the rumors involving some gibberish about demons, aliens, haunted cats, kidnapped cats, schizophrenia, and tons of other similar outright gibbering insanity.

The FBI believes they are spreading their wild gibbering slander in a weird attempt to get witness to NOT come forward with information about my son's murder. This in turn has led the FBI to believe that SOMEONE NEAR BY IS a witness to my son's murder and is scared of these two people. It is believed that this weird smear slander campaign these two are doing, is a direct fear tactic aimed at terrorizing someone they know to be a witness. 

These two are bullying and harassing my family on extreme and outlandish levels. The whole thing is very bizarre, and if this woman had NOT started running her gossiping, busy body, slandering mout h off on every front porch in the area, my son's murder investigation would NOT have been reopened. 

The thing is, for 7 years, from 2013 to 2021, there were ZERO leads. 

The mystery homeless man who showed up on the 7 year anniversary, was the first time anyone came forward claiming to know who the murderer was, but he was murdered 5 days later, and 2 days after that these 2 showed up with their wild tales of demons, aliens, haunted cars, etc.  

Interestingly, at the same time, YouTube got flooded with HUNDREDS of deep fake "Golden Eagle Haunted Car" AI generated videos, alongside TENS OF THOUSANDS of weird "anti-EelKat" Reddit posts spread across well over a hundred Reddit accounts. Which in turn caused my website to have a MEGA massive increase in traffic - with now over a million users per month, searching Google for the term "EelKat golden Eagle Ghost Car Wendy Allen Demon Car" (the keyword that Google Analytics says has sent the most traffic to my website since November 2021). In their weird slander attempt, and in making all these weird deep fake videos, and in posting all those weird Reddit posts, they have had an unexpected side effect of RAISING AWARENESS to my son's murder, by sending millions of people to my website. 

I don't do any marketing or promoting of my website, there is the URL painted on my car and the link from my FaceBook profile, together those each around two thousand people. 

This weird smear campaign these 2 have done since November 2021, has had a HUGE impact on traffic to my website. HUGE. With my site going from 10k average monthly visitors to over SEVEN MILLION average monthly visitors. 

This woman and the white haired man, in their mega hyper attempts to slander men, inadvertently caused people to start direct typing the word "EelKat" into Google search engine, which of course cause Google to give them eelkat.com as a search result. In their attempt to BURY all thoughts of my son's murder, by trying to spread crazy rumors about me, they instead caused the page about my son's murder to receive an average of over ONE MILLION NEW USERS visiting it, EACH MONTH since they stated yelling from porches around Biddeford in November 2021. 

Which in turn has also lead to more than one thousand people calling the police and FBI giving tips about my son's murder. 

So, in their attempt to make me look crazy, all they did was make themselves look very, very, VERY guilty, while spreading awareness about my son's murder to people who, before these two arrived on porched in Biddeford and Old Orchard, were unaware of my son's murder. 

But no, back to your question, I've never seen either of these two. I'm blind, remember? Blind since I was 4 years old. Blind from being beaten in the face with a limb from a pine tree. I have been blind for five decades.

And no, I've never spoken with either of them. I'm mute, remember? My jaw was fused shut, from the bone growing back wrong, after being beaten in the face with a cinder block brick, when I was 14 years old. I have been mute for four decades. I was 42 years old when doctors discovered I was not born mute, but was forcable made mute by "medical augmentation" aka torture. In June 2016, I had surgery to allow me to open my jaw properly for the first time in 40 years, but four decades mute, meant my vocal cords never grew properly, never received conditioning, and now today, I still can not speak properly, my voice is barely a whisper, IF I can even form vocalizations at all, which usually I can not. Because of this I have no physical ability to raise my voice at all, I can not scream or yell at all, I am physically, medically incapable of getting my voice to be anything other then a whisper, and even that causes searing pain, resulting in I don't bother trying to speak.

And no, I've not had contact with anyone. From 1983 until 2006 I was locked in a rusted racoon trap cage in a wood shed "room", and there were only 7 people who ever checked in on me that entire time, and they only did that once a week. Needless to say I never went to school. I had a typewriter, and my grandmother brought paper each week. I became very good at typing, because for 27 years, I had nothing else to do. 

October 2006 a bomb blew up that house. I almost died. Someone put the bomb in that "room" while I was asleep. From 2006 to 2015, I lived under a 8x9 tarp at the back of that wood shed.

Out of the entire of my more then five decades of life, I have only had contact with Humans for three years. From October 2010 to November 2013.

In October 2010 I went to the Old Orchard Beach High School and got my GED after 3 weeks of night classes. I got a ride to the DMV and got my driver's permit. Then I enrolled in two colleges York County Community College and Southern Maine Community College, taking five classes per semester. I could not enroll as a degree student because I do not know how to count or tell time or read clocks or calendars or do maths.

At SMCC, three professors (Andrew Parker, Robert Vettes, and Chris M) attempted to teach me how to speak. The SMCC student counselor brought in social workers and a state psychologist who diagnosed me as "a feral child" and stated I had no social skills on any level whatsoever due to what they termed "the most horrific case of child abuse and neglect ever seen in Maine history". They found my not knowing about things like eating utensils, bathing, or communicating verbally to be the worst case of "feral childism" in modern history.

A team of psychiatrists were brought to the college, over a dozen of the world's top child behavior specialists from countries all over the world: to do a study on the "training of a feral child" and to make "attempts to intergrade a feral child into modern American society". They called me an anomaly and a "once in a hundred years chance of a lifetime study subject".

Four of them predicted I would: never drive a car, never learn to talk, never make a single friend, never learn to interact with Humans, never learn to eat with a fork, and never learn  math. 

I became the "test subject" of more then a dozen "feral child studied" which lasted my entire time at college, and ended abruptly November 14, 2013, when a mystery woman who identified herself as "Claire" attacked with a golf club, murdering my baby and leaving me with a broken spine and paralyzed legs.

Even before I became bedridden in 2013, I could not walk unaided. My hip was stabbed with a foundation rod, that was driven through my right hip and out my left thigh. My Uncle Bruce did that when I was 4 years old. I've struggled to even stand, let alone walk, since I was FOUR years old. So being crippled, unable to walk, was not new. But my whole life, it was my hips, and now it is my spine, and a severed nerve bundle in my spinal column.

Since November 2013 I have been bedridden, and the ONLY way you can talk to me or see me is to visit me, visit my bed.

I can not see.

I can not talk.

I can not walk.

Since 2013 I am out of bed fewer then 2 hours a day. 

And NO ONE... not ONE SINGLE PERSON, ever visited me since 2013, or before.

The ONLY people who arrive are the ones who stand in the driveway and on the porch and yell obscenities and hate slurs from the street... and they are too far away for me to see them, and they are too far away for them to hear my whisper if I tried to talk, which I don't. Plus, I can not sit up, it takes well over an hour for me to sit up in my bed, so by the time I am sitting up, they are gone.

So, anyone telling you I have seen them, spoken with them, yelled at them, interacted with them, at ANY point prior to 1983... when I was locked in that cage ... is lying to you. Because since 1983, NO ONE but my husband Benjamin Kitchle Wildes, my grandmother Eva Viola Atwater, and my uncles Bruce, Dickie, & David, and my aunt Barbara has EVER underreacted with me at all. And the only interactions from Brice, David, Dickie, and Barbara was to electrocute me for the fun of watching me pass out, stabbing me with broken glass again for th e fun of it, and beating me with cinder block bricks because breaking the bones of children is funny according to them.

From October 2010 to November 2013, ar the ONLY three years of my life where I ever went outside and had interaction with Humans, and I was seen as so UN-human that 90% of my Human interactions was with psychiatrists who were giddy piss pants excited to have "a real live feral child oh boy!" to study.

So ANYONE telling you they have ever had ANY form of interactions with me EVER in my ENTIRE LIFE, if lying to you, because those interactions I just listed are the ONLY ones that have EVER happened. PERIOD.

You ask how I can remember everything everyone has ever done and said? Easy? Because so FEW people have ever done or said ANYTHING AT ALL, that it makes it each to remember EVERY ONE of them, for the very simple fact that there is literally not one other thing in my life to remember.

More then 99% of the hours of my life have been spent ALONE, in total darkness, in a cage, or alone, bed ridden in a bed, with no one saying ANYTHING to me, no one EVER interacting with me at all... and with fewer then two hundred total interactions with a Human in my ENTIRE LIFE, I am easily able to remember every single one of them.

Two days is the 10 year anniversary of the murder of my 8 month old son. The killer has not been found yet. Old Orchard Beach, Maine Police at 207-935-4911 and Portland Maine FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322 are investigating the murder of my son so, if you have any information, please give it to them. https://www.eelkat.com/Never-Forget.html 

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the murder of my son, your child shall die an equally horrible death. If you haven't got a child to lose, it will be a brother or sister or parents or spouse or whomever you love the most, and that you should know it was this curse which you brought upon yourself that killed them, they will die on exactly the 7 year anniversary of the very first time, you mocked the death of my child.

Where wee you on your 10th birthday?
I was here:

I was looked in this "room" in Old Orchard Beach, Maine for 27 years. From the time I was 8 years old, until I was 31... I escaped in 2010. That's why in 2013 these same people murdered my 8 month old son and crippled me, and drove a backhoe over my house. To punish me for escaping this room.

Where wee you on your 20th birthday?
I was here:

Where wee you on your 30th birthday?
I was here:

I was looked in this "room" in Old Orchard Beach, Maine for 27 years. From the time I was 8 years old, until I was 31... I escaped in 2010. That's why in 2013 these same people murdered my 8 month old son and crippled me, and drove a backhoe over my house. To punish me for escaping this room.

You never saw the room Ben and my mother kept me locked in for 27 years from the time I was 8 years old, the one Etiole used to break me out of? Well here you go, photos of it from the 2007 FBI and police reports, THIS is the "room", my mother designed it, my father built it, Bruce hired the priests of the Cape Elizabeth, Saco, and Sanford ward Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to rape me in it... from the time i was 8 until 12, when Ben aka the High Priest came along and declared I was his and from the time i was 12 until 31 Ben kept me in this room only allowing me out on Sundays to attend church. still wonder why I hate the Atwaters? When I was 37 years old the FBI showed up and started the investigation into the trafficking ring the Atwaters ran out of 37 Smithwheel Road and 144 Portland Ave, Maine, this room was a pivotal piece of evidence that was roped off and no one allowed in it because of the FBI investigation... that's why the backhoe that ran over this room August 8, 2013 is such a very big importance... THIS room is what the backhoe was trying to hide. Look close at the floor, you can see the bones of the children who didn't survive.

I'm a survivor of adults who thought selling children to priests was a good income and this room was the biggest piece of evidence the FBI had until the backhoe drove over the house and carried off the remained, doing the biggest tampering of evidence of a fucking murder investigation ... that's WHY the backhoe drove over the house, because the Atwaters were desperate to hide the evidence of this rooms existence, and that's WHY they started the alien abduction hoax about me and Etiole because they thought if they destroyed the room and gaslighted me by spread alien abduction rumors, they thought they could convince everyone i was crazy for saying i was locked in this room for 27 years... but they didn't know before they did that, that the FBI had already been in the room and has HUNDREDS of photos of every inch of it. It was not the only place like this. These Atwater run child trafficking "rooms" have been found in twenty-one states. The FBI has shut down 14 of these child trafficking rings run by the Atwaters. If you support the Atwaters in any way, THIS is what you are supporting. When you send money to an Atwater run fund raiser, you funding building more rooms like this one. That's what they do with your hard earned money. Rooms like this, where small children, are raped and starved. And because the children have no birth records, no ID, they live and die without a paper trail. They exist to be raped daily, until they have their first period and risk getting pregnant, and they the room is locked not to be opened again, until they starve to death. Most die before their 12th birthday.

I'm a survivor, and I survived because of Etiole, because while HUNDREDS of people in Old Orchard Beach, Maine knew of this room, used this room, he was the only person with the moral decency to be horrified by this room and try to stand up to the Atwaters, and try the help the children. He used to break in and try to rescue me. Took me out into the swamps of the Ross Forest. But the Atwaters always found me and took me back.

To discredit me, when I was 14 years old, and escaped to the local police and tried to get help, the Atwaters made up a terrible story: they lied to the police. They told the police, there was no room, and Etiole was a figment of my imagination, they called him a demon at first, and later they called him an alien. The Atwaters spread a horrific lie, telling people that I was an alien abductee. And depending on WHICH Atwater you talked to the story changed wildly: sometimes Etiole was a evil spirit, other times a cryptid, other times a demon, but most often "The Amphibious Alien". 

We had a neighbor back in the 1970s, his name was Stephen King, he wrote about us. My Gypsy family, my car, me, and Etiole. He filmed two movies on our farm, but never once tried to help the children he wrote about. He never tried to help us children, even though his books and movies today exist as evidence that he was well aware of this room and Etiole. Instead, he profited off of our pain and suffering, while 120 of those children were saw up and their bones dumped in the Goosefare Broke Ravine in the Reclaim Blueberry Plains of the Ross Forest of Old Orchard Beach, Maine... bones confiscated by the FBI in June 2016, which led to the arrest of many of the child traffickers at 37 Smithwheel Rod, Old Orchard Beach, Maine, that same year. 

Meanwhile The Atwaters continued to spread their lies about me and Etile, contacting hundreds of alien and UFO and cryptid organizations telling them I was abducted by aliens and Etiole was that alien. Only I have no clue what they were doing and I had never heard of the concept of aliens or cryptids or UFOs, and so I had no clue what MUFON and the UFO nuts were talking about, when they showed up on my farm to interview me and try to catch Etiole, calling him an EBE.

There are no aliens.

There are no demons.

There are no evil spirits.

There are no haunted cars.

There was just this room, and the children raped by Mormon priests... Mormon Priests, known as The Atwaters... Mormon Priests who invented the urban myth of a haunted car and a child abducted by aliens, for one reason, and one reason only: to make the children crazy, if those children ever dared tell people about this room.

Rooms like the one at 144 Portland Ave, 146 Portland Ave, and 37 Smithwheel Road, exist all over the State of Maine, and the 3 the FBI shut down in Old Orchard Beach, ran from the 1950s until 2016. I was put in this room in 1983. That's why I have no knowledge of any world event, any movie, and TV show, and books, anything that occurred between 1983 and 2010.

ALL of the children who survived these rooms, ALL of them, have been slandered the same way the Atwaters slandered me and Etiole. Each with stories of aliens and demons. Thirty-one of those survivors, have commit suicide, all who escaped, killed themselves within 3 years because of the alien abduction lies the Atwaters spread about them, alien abduction lies that are no different then the alien abduction lies the Atwaters spread about me and Etiole.

Yes, I am EelKat, Etiole’s friend, but I don’t know why you call me that, because it’s the other way around. He was my friend. He was my ONLY friend. He was the only person in this godforsaken town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, who did not value money or sex over the lives of children.

There are ONE group of people who call me an alien abductee. The Atwaters and their evil, child raping church group. They call me an alien abductee, simple as a gaslighting method, of trying to make me sound crazy, so you won’t look at what they are doing to children. They try to make all the children they torture look crazy, so that no one will believe the child when child tells an adult about the rooms or the rape. Trust NO ONE who calls me an alien abductee, because THEY are involved in a very big child trafficking ring.

I am not an alien abductee and I never claimed to be, and if anyone ever told you I was, you should look at them with suspicion and ask what they did, that they are trying to make you look somewhere else, to not see what they are doing.

There are ONE group of people who call Etiole an alien. The Atwaters and their evil, child raping church group. They call him an alien, simple as a gaslighting method, of trying to make me sound crazy, when I was 8 years old said an old man broke into the room and took me into the swamps; they call him an alien so you won’t look at what they are doing to children. They try to make all the children they torture look crazy, so that no one will believe the child when child tells an adult about the rooms or the rape. Trust NO ONE who calls Etiole an alien, because THEY are involved in a very big child trafficking ring.

Etiole is not an alien and I never said he was, and if anyone ever told you he was, you should look at them with suspicion and ask what they did, that they are trying to make you look somewhere else, to not see what they are doing.

He is a local homeless French Jewish man, whom I let sleep in my car on rainy nights so that he can stay dry. Retarded locals think he is a demon or alien or whatever else they call him, because he is covered in scars and burns and Kabalic tattoos and number tattoos from being a concentration camp survivor from WW2.

You can see video footage of his living conditions:

HERE

and HERE

and HERE. These videos where filmed in 2022

As you can see from the videos, this homeless man whom my sick jackass Uncle Bruce has spent DECADES harassing, has NOTHING, he LITERALLY is living in a hole he dug with his fingernails, in the sand under a fallen tree, and you can see from these videos WHY I let him sleep in my car, and WHY the shit heads of Old Orchard Beach and Biddeford Maine who are harassing this homeless man, calling him a cryptid, calling him an alien, calling him an evil spirit, are scumbag pieces of shit who don't deserve the life god gave them.

The Atwaters and their church group are evil, and if you believe their lies about me or Etiole, then you've fallen for their scam, just like they wanted you to do.

There is right now, in October of 2023, a group of people actively going to houses, store, bars, and restaurants throughout Biddeford and Old Orchard Beach, randomly approaching total strangers and and saying "Have you heard about EelKat?" And then going on some spiel involving wild radical tales of demons, aliens, haunted cars, cats, about 40 people near as we can tell, led by an elderly white haired man who drives a dark green pick up truck and a very fat, extremely morbidly obese blond woman about late 30s/early 40s, who people in the area have dubbed "porch bitch" because she goes from porch to porch all over Biddeford screaming from strangers' porches to walkers on the sidewalk, always screaming "Have you head about EelKat?" usually referencing also my Volvo. The FBI believes these two to be the husband and daughter of the woman who murdered my son. If you know who the white haired man or "porch bitch" are, the FBI is actively seeking information about their identity.

I am legally blind, I have never seen either of these people, so I do not know what they look like, I only know what witnesses are telling me they looked like when they showed up at their homes. I also have Kannar's Syndrome, real and actual (non-verbal, low functioning) Autism (not to be confused with high functioning Aspergers; I am only able to communicate by typing, and so here I am, typing, so I am unable to verbally respond to what these people are telling me. I have agoraphobia so, it is often months between me setting foot outside, but I am crippled with a broken spine from the November 14, 2013 attack of the golf club woman who crippled me when she murdered me son and thus I also can not get out of bed or stand up unaided. I do not know who either porch bitch or the white haired man these people are telling me is approaching them are. My son's murderer whom also crippled me, she I can identify if she ever got close enough again, but these two people whom are suspected of being her husband and daughter, I have not seen and can not identify. When you come to me and tell me they have approached you, you do nothing useful or helpful. I can not take YOUR testimony to the police or FBI, because it is YOUR testimony, not mine. YOU have to tell the POLICE and FBI what these people did. Do not come to me and tell me, because other then post this message here, there is nothing else I can do with the information you have provided.

There is some speculation that porch bitch may in fact live in my apartment building here at 409 Main Street in Biddeford, but I have lived here since February 2019, and of the 9 other families here, only one of them has lived here longer than me. Between the 9 families in our building, there are more then people living in this building and to date, I have met none of them.

Initially I had tried to introduce myself to each family in this building however, they are white and I am not, they are Christians and I am Moron/Voodoo, and this Maine where hatred of all things not white and not Christian are at their worst in the entire country.

White hatred for us Gypsies is very bad here in Maine and many in my family have been beaten, tortured, and murdered by the white Christians of Maine.

Does porch bitch live in our building? I do not know. But many witnesses are now saying they have seen her going in and out of the building, so she either lives here or knows someone who does.

With the extreme anti-Gypsy animosity and anti-Pagan animosity the 9 families who live at 409 Main Street have shown my family since we moved in here on February 2019, I would not be at all surprised if porch bitch not only lived here but the others know it, know what she is doing to my family and are not reporting it to the police simply because, that's what white people do to us non-whites.

Interestingly, witnesses are saying they believe the white haired man with the big green Dodge Ram pickup truck, lives on Portland Ave, very near my farm.

It is deeply disturbing, if this is true, because that means porch bitch and the white haired man are doing very severe levels of stalking, because my family has lived at 146 Portland Ave Old Orchard Beach since the 1530s, we settled and founded the town, and in 2019 when I moved into this apartment in Biddeford, no one else lived in this building, other then the gay couple who are still here and the only ones here longer than me. And also in 2019, there was no white haired man living near me on Portland Ave. 

This means, the man suspected of being "Clair's husband and the woman suspected of being "Claire's" daughter, Claire being the name the woman who murdered my son, called herself, have moved in next door to BOTH of my addresses within the last 3 years.

Claire used a golf club to beat my 8 month old son's head in with. If you are protecting Claire, know that THAT is the sort of child murdering bitch you are defending.

Claire's identity is the one we want. We want to know who she is. In 2021 a homeless man showed up in my driveway, claiming he knew who Claire was... 2 days later he was dead on the train tracks and splattered across the back of my house, and 2 days after that, this porch bitch woman showed up. We don't know who any of these people are, not the homeless man, not porch bitch, not Claire. We only got the name Claire, because that's what the bald man with her,November 14, 2013, the day she murdered my son, that's what he called her, and she answered him to that name, like it was her real name.

The Claire who murdered my son, she's who we are looking for... and apparently we got really close in 2021, because that's when porch bitch showed up with her wild alien/demon/cat slander, and she's working over time spreading her slander as far and as wide as she can, making it damn clear, she's scared shitless of us finding out who Claire is.

So, NOW, the FBI is not just asking for information about Claire's identity, they now want the identity of both Biddeford's porch bitch and Old Orchard Beach's white haired elderly man driving the mega, big 2ton dark green Dodge Ram pick up.

These 2 people closing in on my family, DAYS after a witness came forward saying he knew who Claire was, a witness who died 2 days later, before the FBI agents had a chance to talk to him... this is terrifying for my family, and it's deeply disturbing.

Porch bitch and her friends are terrorizing my family. And less then a month ago they killed my dog Mickey. There is something wrong with these people. These are NOT good people.

This is very, very deeply disturbing.

This makes them, in addition to everything else: stalkers.

Keep in mind too, porch bitch is the woman who poisoned and killed my dog Mickey only a few weeks ago. And one week before she poisoned and killed my dog, Mickey, she showed up at PortCon 2023, with a gang of about 12 others, at Round 1 in the Maine Mall, and tried to kill me, by peeling back the cheese on my pizza and loading it up with onions, something I am deadly allergic to. I would have been dead within 15 minutes had I eaten it. Porch bitch is dangerous. And she wants me dead. And she thinks nothing of killing my pets. She's proven that much.

There are HUNDREDS of people throughout Biddeford and Old Orchard Beach contacting me, both online and in person offline, telling me that these people approached them at random. They appear to be hellbent on approaching every single person to set foot in either town, so if you are in Biddeford or Old Orchard Beach you'll likely encounter them sooner or later if you haven't already. They appear to have been doing this since around May 2021, but so far no one knows who they are.

One detail though: porch bitch, has been saying some very specific information about the murder that was NEVER made public, and is not in the police public access report, it's only in the FBI's classified report. The ONLY person who knows this detail is the murderer herself, and porch bitch is too young to be the murderer. The blond golf club woman who attacked me November 14, 2013, was in her late 60s to early 70s, she'd be in her late 70s or early 80s today. Porch bitch is young enough to be her daughter or granddaughter. But porch bitch has been saying information that ONLY the murderer would know, so porch bitch DOES have personal contact with my son's murderer and is probably dangerous herself.

She has information that was never released to the public. Information the police and fbi kept out of public access reports. Information that was kept classified so it could be used to identify the murderer. Information she could only get, from the murderer. She is using 27 Facebook accounts and over 100 Reddit accounts to post that information as far and wide as possible, while gathering up a large group from the Sanford ward church to go around Biddeford and Old Orchard Beach also spreading that classified information, while at the same time spreading the rumors and lies that I am an alien Abducted and Etiole is an alien, while also spreading rumors of my cars being haunted, while also making hundreds of deep fake videos on YouTube about me and my cars and Etiole. She is orchestrating a huge defamation slander smear campaign, which you have seen some of the videos about me and my car. Fbi believes she is the daughter of the golf club bitch who murdered my baby and is doing this because Tod Murphy told the FBI his mother was bragging to be the golf club woman. Porch bitch showed up same time Tod Murphy did, in fall of 2021. The Sanford ward people joined her around May 2022. Fbi is currently investigating every one connected to the Sandford ward, and they now believe the golf club woman to have been a member in 2013. You don't have full details of what porch bitch is doing, who is helping her, and how alarmingly large scale what she is doing is, simply because I can not give you full details. There is a lot of information about porch bitch and her crew that I've not said, things the FBI and police are aware of, and you the general public, don't need to be aware of.

These people are actively and deliberately making a massive attempt to compromise an FBI murder investigation, alongside huge levels of victim shaming.

Porch bitch clearly knows who the murderer is, and the FBI is looking for ANY information you have that leads to identifying porch bitch, because arresting porch bitch, is right now, the #1 best chance of also finding and arresting my son's killer.

If you have any information about any of these events, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

Never forget: my son was murdered. That's what they want you to forget. They make up crazy rumors and lies because they want you to think about something, anything OTHER then my son's murder. And the ONLY person with THAT motive, is the golf club wielding blond woman, and anyone who is trying to cover up her crimes.

They want you to forget my son was murdered.

Clearly porch bitch is scared shitless that the killer, someone she knows, will be arrested soon, or she wouldn't be so hyper vigilant in her mega extreme slander campaign going on in Biddeford, Maine right now.

Beware of ANYONE who calls Etiole an alien, for he is not an alien and they are lying to you about him, as a slight of hand means of misdirection, to turn you away from seeing their own crimes.

Beware of anyone who tells you I believe in aliens, for I do not, and they are lying to you in a gaslighting technique meant to keep you from noticing the crimes they commited.

Trust no one who tells you I cast curses or consort with demons, for I do neither, and they say these things to you out of malicious motives, to make you look at anything other than themselves. They don't want you to see the sins they do, so they spread wild and bizarre rumors about me and an elderly homeless veteran, in a magicians pallor trick of misdirection. They use me and Etiole as their smoke and mirrors, so that you are looking the other way, while they get away with heinous crimes.

Beware of anyone who calls me a witch, for I am a Mormon, 5th generation, and we Mormons do not believe in witchcraft.

I need not tell you their names, for by their own actions, they will reveal themselves to you.

Pay very close attention to anyone who approaches you to "warn you" about EelKat... because remember too, my name is not EelKat. My name is Wendy Christine Allen. EelKat is a fictional character, a talking back fairy cat, from a Space Fantasy novel. Miss Citten The Eel Kat is Empress of Planet Ptarmagin and she travels to distant galaxies in a star ship, collecting deep space eels from other planets, her name is unpronounceable, so people call her "The Eel Kat" because she is the cat who has pet eels. The book was titled "Friends Are Forever" and it was published in 1978. You have to be severely mentally disabled in order to think that a talking space cat from a Fantasy novel is real, let alone be crazy enough to think that the author is that character. The very fact alone that porch bitch refers to ME as EelKat, that alone tells you the deeply disturbed fantasy prone mental case we are dealing with her. Her inability to discern fiction from reality, and he belief that I, a real person, an EelKat, a fictional space cat from a novel, or her belief that a local homeless veteran, is an alien, or her belief that my Dodge or my Volvo are demon possessed, that alone tells you what type of incredibly dangerous psychopath porch bitch really is. 

You can see video footage of his living conditions:

HERE

and HERE

and HERE.

THAT is the homeless veteran, this woman is calling an alien or a demon, depending on which delusion she is babble that day. THAT is Etoile. THAT is how he lives. THAT is who this deplorable woman is harassing.

Pay very close attention to anyone who approaches you to "warn you" about EelKat or otherwise tries to convince you I have anything to do with aliens, demons, curses, or witches, for they are deceiving you, and they do so, to draw your attention away from themselves. 

Never forget, my son was murdered on November 14, 2013, and the killer still walks free, and anyone telling you anything about aliens, demons, curses, or witches, has one goal and one goal only: a flagrant attempt to discredit me, and protect my son's murderer.

They ONLY want you to think about aliens to make you forget my son was murdered.

The FBI is looking for my son's killer AND the identity of the people who are trying to hinder their investigation.

If anyone approaches you and tells you Etiole is an alien CALL FBI Agent Andy Drewer and tell him who they are. They ONLY want you to think about aliens to make you forget my son was murdered.

Never forget, November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322 

If anyone approaches you and tells you that I believe in aliens CALL FBI Agent Andy Drewer and tell him who they are. They ONLY want you to think about aliens to make you forget my son was murdered. 

Never forget, November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

If anyone approaches you and tells you Etiole is a demon CALL FBI Agent Andy Drewer and tell him who they are. They ONLY want you to think about demons to make you forget my son was murdered. 

Never forget, November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322 

If anyone approaches you and tells you that I believe in demons CALL FBI Agent Andy Drewer and tell him who they are. They ONLY want you to think about demons to make you forget my son was murdered.

Never forget, November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

If anyone approaches you and tells you that I cast curses CALL FBI Agent Andy Drewer and tell him who they are. They ONLY want you to think about curses to make you forget my son was murdered. 

Never forget, November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

If anyone approaches you and tells you that I am a witch CALL FBI Agent Andy Drewer and tell him who they are. They ONLY want you to think about witches to make you forget my son was murdered. 

Never forget, November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

They are going out of their way to try to make you forget my son died, by coming up with ludicrous tales of aliens and demons. And the ONLY person with ANY motive to do that, is the blond woman who murdered my son.

They want you to forget my son was murdered.

NEVER FORGET!

Never forget, November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

They are going out of their way to try to make you forget my son died, by coming up with ludicrous tales of aliens and demons. And the ONLY person with ANY motive to do that, is the blond woman who murdered my son.

NEVER FORGET!