Kill Your Darlings! And Other Unpleasantries.

Here is an overview of today's episode.

00:00--Intro

00:14--New logo! Please let me know if the old one is what you see so I may fix it.

01:12--Importance of self-care and seeing old friends, especially after this past year of isolation.

01:52--Last week's question was "How do you deal with an increased workload?" And these were the responses to that.

03:32--This week's Question of the Week is, "What are you doing today to measure your success?" Please send a response on today's Instagram post @authordevindavis.

04:44--Goals have changed because my entire book has changed.

05:34--Art is a pull to self-express. When pour so many hours of our lives into it, it can feel like this project is our baby. But when we hope to sell our art it becomes a juggling act of our self-expression mixed with what people actually want. "Kill Your Darlings" means being willing to change or abandon a project to meet market requirements.

11:17--Revision is another form of practice, and practice is how we get better at anything.

12:37--Tranditionally published author Alexa Donne showed that a break-out novel is usually 100,000 words. People write longer than this, but not with their breakout novel.

15:35--For a debut novel, publishers push for 100,000-word manuscripts because they are more affordable to print than longer books.

16:22--The realization that my book was far too long. But I'm willing to pivot and to be flexible.

18:00--Restructuring my novel so one of the subplots is now its own books. Scrivener made this restructuring easy.

19:40--New things to figure out. Pacing to fix. Ideas to further develop. And a new character that I'm not acquainted with yet.

23:08--Outro. Leave a review on your podcast app. And follow me on Instagram @authordevindavis