Welcome to the final day of The Belgrave Legacy Blog Series. This series started on September 20, 2016.
You can see all my past posts: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Day 12.
Two of the previous posts, Day 1 and Day 2, talk about the beginnings of The Belgrave Legacy, both the inception of the idea and a few examples of how the first draft has changed in transforming into the published version that was released yesterday (you can find all the buy links below).
Today, I’m going into a bit more into the functional details alluded to in both of those other posts (mostly, the timeframe it took from start to finish)
After reading Day 1‘s post, you know how the idea and Chapter 1 came to be. What I didn’t mention there is that I wrote a whole draft in a month during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an awesome writing campaign that gets authors to be productive and brings literacy programs into schools all over the world.
But that was just the beginning. It took me 2 years to write a first draft of The Belgrave Daughter (what was going to be Book 1 of The Belgrave Legacy trilogy). And then I revised it for another year. As I was going through more than eight different revisions, I also wrote first drafts of Tears of an Angel and The Witch’s War (which became Prophecy).
I “finished” The Belgrave Daughter, revised Tears of an Angel, and based on feedback from my early readers, I then decided to forget the trilogy idea and make it all into one book. And that involved moving bits from Part 1 to 2, deleting extraneous subplots from Part 2, and heightening the tension in Part 3 (you can read more about this in Day 2‘s post). This penultimate stage took place during the second half of my high school senior year and
And then the tweaking began anew in January 2016 as I tried to refine the story to its fullest potential and to the best of my ability before sending it to critique partners, making more changes, sending it to an editor, and the final cleanup. It wasn’t until May 2016 that I was able to officially call this manuscript completed. September 2016 is when the print cover was designed, and the rest is history.
It’s taken over 5 years (starting from The Belgrave Daughter’s first draft, all the writing periods and all the long gaps in between, and ending with this final version of The Belgrave Legacy that you’re now holding) for me to reach this point. And what a wild journey it’s been!