128: Being Good Enough
4/26/2023
I reread the entire Part Three: The Ghost Frog yesterday. Timed with the stopwatch function on my tablet, and it took 5 hours and 43 minutes to read 183 pages; 54,737 words. I was glad to see that my latest 12 chapters that I’ve just written this year were better than the 8 I had done already years ago. That means I’m getting better.
The bad news is it still sucked. Where I thought I was 95% done with only 5% left to do down the road by polishing with rewrites, it turns out I’m closer to being only 75% done with a LOT of rewriting yet to do.
Not just editing out redundancies, fixing plot holes, and minimizing excess expository baggage – but just the basic diction of line editing is clunky, amateurish crap.
Very disappointing. Turns out all my work so far has come to nothing more than figuring out what happens. The bare bones skeleton for the story. Everything else is in serious need of a major rewriting campaign.
Talk about demoralizing.
I’ve gotten better as a writer, but I still suck.
Present-Day Reflection
9/30/2026
I’m just starting my vacation from my day job, so I finally have some free time (nine days) to catch up on everything that’s been slipping through the cracks. Today I’m going to try and finish the final edits for Wings of Providence. I failed to meet my deadline for the print on demand submissions, but Amazon’s KDP will let me update the final edits once my book launch date has passed – October 1st.
I vastly underestimated how long it would take to reread and make the final touches to my manuscript. In fact, I only got as far as Chapter 42: Conscience, which is right at the beginning of the Ghost Frog story arc. So, what this journal entry from April 26th 3 ½ years ago was referring to, I’m just going back over now. It will take me longer than 5 hours and 43 minutes though since I will be fine tuning this time.
If I remember correctly, I already did most of the major rewriting of all this back in 2024 and early 2025. But this sort of thing is never truly done. As with all forms of art, creative writing is never really finished, it’s simply abandoned. Eventually you just have to say enough is enough and move on. And for me that will be when I upload my final submission to Amazon’s KDP for the book’s print version.
1 day left until my launch date.
