Melissa Grant Writes

My husband thought I was insane.

I was.

My dog thought I was scary.

I was.

My friends thought I was annoying.

I was.

I had a goal of a chapter a day and did six the first day! No problem! I’ll be done with this in a week!

Oh, Melissa, you big, dumb Pig Latin-speaking preschooler.

Chapter seven landed with a big adult POV problem. Rose and Storm (aka Mom and Dad) spent maybe 80% of the chapter having a big romantic conversation in the kitchen with no kid in sight. That’ll work for your average 10-year-old. Right?

Wrong.

It was so wrong I just took it out. I started a doc listing all the information I might want to put elsewhere, shifted all my chapters and patted myself on the back.

There! That wasn’t so bad! I can do this!

Oh boy…

Chapter eight arrived, and I almost cried. I took a look at the book map (genius idea btw, highly recommend), saw how many chapters I needed to fix and immediately scheduled a Zoom call with Tiffiny.

Meanwhile, I consulted good old Google and found, “Two POVs is the most common and effective choice for MG.”

Again, I had five.

So who do I keep and who do I cut?

Two were obvious to me; they didn’t have a ton to contribute, but there were two others (besides my MC) that I went back and forth on. After my call with Tiffiny, with her help, the decision was made, and I settled in to fix everything.

There was a lot of ‘fixing.’

A f*ck ton, actually.

It was hard, really hard.

I would pluck the scene out, put it in another doc, decide how to rework it, and then put it back. If there was information that no longer worked in that scene but was needed, I had another doc that I referred to over and over and over again while I edited.

When the real editing got to be too much, I’d spend the evening doing mindless find-and-replace work on the parent names instead…find-Rose, replace-her mom. Ugh.

Then my husband decided some work needed to be done on the house. My dog decided the nail gun meant she was back in Nam or something, and she needed to be on top of me.

All the time.

There was screeching.

Did it help the dog’s problem?

Absolutely not. CBD did the trick there.

I got 25 chapters in and hit a wall. The noise, the dog stress- I could no longer think straight. All the tabs in my brain opened about 3 am and I couldn’t sleep, like at all.

Do I need therapy?

Probably.

Do I need wine?

Absolutely.

At 2 am one night, I decided I was going to go to a hotel with my poor, shell-shocked pooch, order room service (and yes, probably wine), put my head down and finish.

Did that go well?

Well, kind of (you can read that story here), but I did manage to get all the way through.

And then, I started the whole process again.

Cue the screeching.