The Journey and Making Mistakes

I just got my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu blue belt, and it was a long and arduous journey to get there. Mistakes were made, there was a lot of trial-and-error, risks were taking, and it was both physically and mentally draining at times. Sounds a lot like trying to become a published author.

The latest thing that that I discovered with writing was something to do with the editing process. I’ve read The Mustard Prince in the Condiment Kingdom, and tried to edit the grammatical errors sentence-by-sentence. However, when I read the first couple pages aloud as part of a free short story reading on my YouTube page, it just didn’t sound right.

When I did my initial edit, it was mainly to look for grammatical errors. Now, I’m doing a read aloud edit where I’m reading entire paragraphs to see how each sentence flows to the next sentence. I’ve taken out many sentences doing this, as I’ve found words and sentences that just didn’t need to be there. I even changed the names of some of the minor characters. There were times that I was trying to be too “cute” with what I was writing, like putting events out of order, but reading it aloud, that was not a good idea.

I’m actually regretting putting this out and sending it to literary agents. Lesson learned, I suppose, but I can’t imagine this journey without mistakes being made.