I am still here… sort of.

Well, I'd totally forgotten about this blog here, as you might have been able to tell from the fact I haven't posted or updated in several years.
Guess what? I'm STILL working on the same book! It's sure been a long slog. I never thought it'd take this long.
I did finally manage to get the first draft finished – all written out in longhand, I should add. I had thought, foolishly as it turned out, that the second draft would be a fairly easy affair. Just transposing the manuscript from my notebooks onto computer, with a little tweaking and adjusting to put a few things right and tighten it up. If only…
It had taken so long to write the first draft and I'd completed an MA in Creative Writing during that time and learned a lot about writing along the way, that when I started to read through the manuscript, I found the writing wasn't as good as I thought. It was Hemingway who said, "The first draft of anything is shit" and he was absolutely right, especially where my first draft was concerned.
To be fair, I had just tried to get the story down on paper and so it was all going to be very rough but even so, it was way different to how I'd imagined it to be.
The long and the short of it is that the second draft turned out to be a massive rewrite of the whole book. I had the story down but I rewrote every scene, changed the order of scenes, cut some, added new ones – just tried to write it better.
It took about a year. Then I read through it again. It still wasn't right, as good as I wanted it to be. It still felt a way off. So, I went through it again, right from the beginning, rewriting and changing as I went. By the end of this draft, things seemed to be getting better but still not good enough.
I did yet another draft before I was ready to show it to anyone and sent it to a couple of close friends for their honest feedback. I made it clear I didn't want them to worry about massaging my ego but to tell me honestly if they thought there was anything that wasn't working or that they felt was wrong. While they were reading it, I went through it again myself, making further changes.
When I got their feedback, it was very helpful. I made some changes based on what they said, though in hindsight, perhaps I should have made more.
Anyway, as it was, with the fifth complete draft done, I was finally ready to send it to my agent.
The feedback I received was very positive overall but it still needed some work. There were a few things that they thought I should change. Although there were only a few things, they effected the whole book. Just as I started on another major rewrite, things in my personal life meant I put the book aside for what turned out to be a whole year.
After a long break, I'm back to it, rewriting it yet again. Trying to do the best that I can.