I published ‘gather the weeds’ in 2006. While some people liked my novel, some of the criticisms in goodreads reviews hit close to home. One was that my first novel was wordy and imprecise:

“All of the above might be surmounted if Kilgallon wasn’t addicted to padding. He’s wordy and imprecise. “His hand rests on the cool knob of the door and turns, the door clicking open.” Why not just, “He opened the door.”? Or “So, alone he wept and wept hard, clean tears from his eyes flowing, nostrils leaving trails of snot on his tattered and tear-stained pillow.” If there are hard clean tears, there must be soft dirty tears, but I can’t conceive of those. Why couldn’t he have just wept instead of wept and wept? And if he’s weeping, what’s the point of “eyes flowing”? Nostrils leaving trails of snot? Ugly and elusive. “Tattered and tear-stained pillow.” Let go of my wrist, Kilgallon.”

So I decided to rewrite everything more than four times. I managed to get it from 365 pages manuscript to 253 pages, while adding more scenes and passages. I also tried to market it, but I thought that my book cover can sell itself. I had a lot to learn about being skilled at selling myself as a writer. One was to accept criticisms and fix my early mistakes. Another is to accept that no matter how many times I rewrote it, it will never reach perfection. So I decided to try again and see if I can self publish and see if I can be more successful. Or at the very least, have my novel out available for sale to the general readers out there, and move on to finishing my second novel.