I think I am now finally happy with my first chapter.

Maybe. Possibly after I read through it one more time and tweak a few words here and there.

I’ve probably edited the first chapter five times more than the second chapter, which gets more attention than the 3rd and 4th and so on. It seems that I tend to go back to the start before I can finish going through even one eighth of the book.

Consequently, the first part of my book reads like a completely different novel to the end of it. I really am going to have to change that ending.

In graphical form, this is what my editing progress looks like:

I’m sure I’ll get there one day. I find the editing process this time round to be faster that writing, but I know that’s far from true. I wrote this story in one year, back when I was 13. Now, at 21, I’ve done one complete edit, mostly looking for errors, and twice attempted to polish the book up to a publishable state.

I’m breaking the book down from 4 chapters of 30,000 words each to smaller chapters of approximately 3,000 words each. I’m making the characters older, and using more adjectives. I’m taking out the really strange things that don’t make sense and shouldn’t be explained by magic. I’ve given the character’s more faults, but kept their strengths. Some of them anyway.

There’s still a lot of work to do, but when I re-read my first chapter again today it actually made me smile.

And that, my friends, is a good thing.