Writing in the Tiny House

Author Devin Davis is a single father of three boys living in a tiny house in Northern Utah. He has a real goal to become a known author, and he's going to share with you that writing a book is completely possible regardless of the circumstances.

Let's Discuss Three Act Structure; Young Goodman Brown 05/17/2023

Let's Discuss Setting; Young Goodman Brown 05/10/2023

Let's Discuss Allegory; Young Goodman Brown 05/03/2023

Young Goodman Brown 04/26/2023

Let's Discuss White Room Syndrome: "The Plymouth Express Affair" 03/09/2023

Let's Discuss Dialogue: "The Plymouth Express Affair" 03/01/2023

Let's Discuss Characters: "The Plymouth Express Affair" 02/22/2023

Let's Discuss Background and Structure: "The Plymouth Express Affair." 02/08/2023

Agatha Christie's "The Plymouth Express Affair" 02/01/2023

A Season of Short Stories 01/11/2023

The Ending of a Season 12/28/2022

Therapy 12/21/2022

Seasons of Writing 12/14/2022

Freewrite 12/07/2022

Moving On. 11/30/2022

NANOWRIMO: Villains and Plot 11/23/2022

NANOWRIMO: Villains and Dialogue 11/16/2022

NaNoWriMo: All About Villains! 11/09/2022

NANOWRIMO 2022 HAS BEGUN! 11/02/2022

Preptober: Let's Get Vain! 10/26/2022

Join Hands! 10/19/2022

Preptober: Out (of) Line 10/12/2022

Pick a Character, Any Character! 10/05/2022

Preptober: It Has Begun! 09/28/2022

Take a Vacay! 09/21/2022

Live, At the Moment 09/14/2022

Reality Check 09/07/2022

Reality Check A dose of reality for today. “Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon: Become a patron today! Visit Get ahold of Krissy Barton with Little Syllables editing services. She does free sample edits to see if you and she would be the right fit. Instagram: @authordevindavis Twitter: @authordevind The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage. [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the show Writing in the Tiny House. The entire point of this podcast is to help the tormented artist by sharing what I know about writing, publishing, and stress management, so that you can have the tools to produce the content that you have been eager to write. If you have the steps in place, you can produce a short story in as few as three months or a novel in as few as 18. And hopefully through the ideas in this podcast, you will have the wisdom to adjust that timeline if you need to. I am Devin Davis, the guy who lives and writes in a tiny house in Northern Utah. Thank you for tuning in, and please enjoy today's episode of Writing in the Tiny House. Hello and good morning. It is another [00:01:00] Wednesday. And here we are in the tiny house doing another episode of this awesome show guys. It has been rough. Things have been rough, and I will compile another clip episode on my experience with beta readers later, just because that whole process isn't finished yet. I have a few beta readers who have not given feedback. I'm going to be meeting one of them tonight for drinks. I'm excited to hear what she has to say, but there has been a reality check in my life, and I have decided to share that reality check with you all today. at the same time, I don't want this to sound bitter or whatever, just because sometimes when we have moments like this, it's really easy to just get mad and it's okay to get mad. It is also a very healthy way to realize your life and to realize what you're doing, to realize the next [00:02:00] steps to realize. Your reality, hence the reality check. here's the fundamental question with all of this that I don't know that I've addressed in a previous episode of writing in the tiny house, what does it take to be a writer? What does it take for a person to say that they are a writer and like with so many art based things? I mean, in reality, you don't, you don't have to have painted anything in order to say that you're a painter, you certainly don't have to have sold any of your paintings to say that you're a painter and you don't have to have any of your artwork in your house. It is something where you can say it. And it is true I mean, with painting, perhaps you, you need to have held a brush at some time in your life, and that could have been at any time. And at that moment in time, you were a painter and you could still claim to be a painter because, because, because of opinions, because of, [00:03:00] you know, time isn't real, anyway, stuff like that. Writing is the same. If you have written an essay ever in your life, you are a writer and today you could still claim to be a writer. If you have not written a single word since that essay in junior high school at the same time, though, if you do claim to be a writer, people will want to see. the fruits of your labor. They will want to see what you have done. And so if you say that you are a writer, especially if it is your profession instead of your hobby, and that's another tricky part with this friends, if you want it to be your profession, there's a lot of stuff that you're going to have to do. and the fact of the matter is most writers in this world do not support themselves through their writing. If you want to support yourself through your writing, there is a [00:04:00] lot you are going to have to do, and it will take a long time. I mean, there are always exceptions to all of the things that I'm going to be saying, but by and large, most writers don't support themselves with writing and. Those who do it has taken a long time to get there, or a lot of the writers that we see today are able to write full time because a loved one is actually supporting them Or whatever they write full time because they don't need to worry about income. Income is being provided somewhere else, either through a loved one or inheritance or whatever, whatever. and like I said, there's always exceptions to that. , but here we are here. We here I am. I finished another pass with TIS and we're doing the beta readers and I received feedback that ti needs to be longer ti needs to be a full on novel instead of just a Nove The beta reader who said that [00:05:00] had all of the reasons to back it up, had all of it for this reason and that reason and whatever the thing is, I originally wrote his. thinking that it would just be a short story. And so I worked it out in the method that we see short stories. There aren't many characters. There aren't many characters who speak, everything feels pretty condensed. and that's how I wanted it, but was it the best way to do it? This beta reader has shown me that probably it wasn't. So while there were definitely strong parts in Ts, and I appreciate that and I love knowing that those things were there. thus far, I've gotten a lot of good feedback from ti. Another trick, like another kind of interesting thing with beta readers is if somebody says that they don't like the main character and another person says that they do like the main character, the thing is both of those beta readers are right. I mean, there's always a chance that the first person missed [00:06:00] something or there's a chance that I didn't do it. Right. Or there's probably. A greater chance of a little bit of both of those possibilities, but I've received very good feedback from ti thus far, but one beta reader wanted to understand the scope of it all. the thing is TIS is supposed to be the first book of a world of books. I. Hesitate to say that it's a, well, it would be a series, but the thing is, each of the books is not necessarily a continuation of the previous book. Most of these books will have different characters with different plots and different things, but they all take place in the same world. And so this collection of books, this tales from LAER stuff. That we've been doing for the past while is actually a world of books. It is [00:07:00] a world of lives. It's a world of people and not necessarily all of the books are continuations of a previous plot. and that's where we are. So we have stories that take place in this city. We have stories that take place in another city and the stories are unrelated except for a single element that ties in later. And of course, all of this builds for the final thing at the end, just because that's how it gets to be. Right. You build for 10 books and then you have the final trilogy at the end with a big battle. it? It's something that we've seen a lot in fantasy. going back to this idea of being a writer and what it all kind of looks like this beta reader wanted to understand the scope of where we were headed with this of where T was going of the [00:08:00] future projects. that are on the horizon, so to speak. And she said that the story is too big and the world is too complicated. And the intricacies of the magic system are such that it cannot all be properly developed in a Nove. And the thing with releasing a collection of short stories and a collection of Noves over time is the entire world is not fully developed in each Nove. And unless the Noves are all released at the same time, the reader is only going to get a half baked world in each Nove over the next. Many years until I'm finished with them. And so I can either release a collection of Noves all at once, or I can kind of flex my muscles and do all of the world building and make [00:09:00] TIS a big beefy novel, which will then set off this entire collection of this entire world of books with a splash. There's a lot of. heat writing on the first book of any collection of stories and any series. The first book is super important and I am convinced right now that a Nove is not the best way to do a first book. It was a year ago. That I was seeing a trend of people releasing a Nove as a way to test a theory or to test the market, to see if releasing something larger or something, you know, along those lines of the Nove later would land well. And so the novella was a way to test the market and the thing. Now that we are [00:10:00] 18 months beyond that, beyond me hearing about that first trend, I have not seen the fruit of any of the people following those trends yet. I know of one person who released a Nove. His name is Daniel Green. and it was his first, anything that he ever wrote, he has a very large following on YouTube, a very respectable, big following. And so he's self-published because he already has a big audience that he directly addresses, I think two times a week on his channel on YouTube. And he released a novella and I don't know what has come of. I don't know if he has continued with that or not, or if it was just a good project that he did. And now it's done. Who knows? I mean, I could, I could figure it out and I probably shouldn't include that on a podcast episode, but here we are just standing here thinking so. [00:11:00] considering the length of time that comes in between these projects is a Nove the best way to go. Like I said, I'm convinced that it's not, that also means that ti gets to be largely rewritten. And so to be a writer, here's the thing, friends here is the hard thing to be a writer you write to be a writer does not mean that other people will have to read what you have written. You do not need to land yourself a big following in order to be considered a writer. I have thus far written, literally hundreds of thousands of words. Literally hundreds of thousands of words that all belong within this world of lado. And this dates back to my first novels that I released when I was 24. I mean, this was forever ago. And I mean, it's what happens when you're 24 and you're eager to have a book out in [00:12:00] the world. And so you release a book that has not had a final proofread. So those books are not available now, but they take place in lado and so, here we are. I have written hundreds of thousands of words. I am going to write hundreds of thousands of more words until a readership gets a hold of any of it. And so the question of the day is, and I ask this very seriously because I already know my own answer, but I'm going to pose it to you. The listeners of writing in the tiny house. I'm, I'm assuming that most of you are writers are hoping to be whether professionally or as a hobby or whatever writing fulfills in your life. If you end up writing hundreds of thousands of words and a handful of people only ever get to read some of it, is it all worth it?[00:13:00] So go ahead and think about that because hundreds of thousands of words represents hours and hours, hundreds of hours. if not more and as a writer, is it worth it? If only a handful of people ever read a fraction of the stuff you have written. So for me, the answer is yes, that's something that I've been toiling with for a long time. And I have this big ass series. That I have been struggling with for a long time to begin to start. And now, because life is different than it was 10 years ago, I can start it, but this is something that will likely carry me into my sixties. There's enough books and enough, there there's enough content to carry me into my sixties. we get to just wonder if something that takes up so much [00:14:00] of my life, doesn't get read by somebody else or only a handful of other people and whatever else is it going to be worth it, something to think about. So thank you for joining me. And I leave you with that sobering thought. And that is it for today. Before we go, I need to say that my current work in progress Tiz the next installment of Tales from Vlaydor is ready for beta readers, people to read the novella and share with me their experience. It's a big, important step before publishing. So if you wish to be a part of this project, reach out to me on my social media handles; on Instagram I'm @authordevindavis, and on Twitter I'm @authordevind. And remember that my short story Brigitte is available on Amazon as an ebook and on Audible as an audio book. Check those out today. [00:15:00] /episode/index/show/wthpodcast/id/24298107

Take Notes! 08/31/2022

Take Notes! Even if you take time away from your manuscript, make sure to take notes while your brain (and beta readers) tell you changes to make during your next pass of edits! If you are interested in being a beta reader for Tiz, my novella, be sure to contact me on my social media handles. “Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon: Become a patron today! Visit Get ahold of Krissy Barton with Little Syllables editing services. She does free sample edits to see if you and she would be the right fit. Instagram: @authordevindavis Twitter: @authordevind The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage. [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the show Writing in the Tiny House. The entire point of this podcast is to help the tormented artist by sharing what I know about writing, publishing, and stress management, so that you can have the tools to produce the content that you have been eager to write. If you have the steps in place, you can produce a short story in as few as three months or a novel in as few as 18. And hopefully through the ideas in this podcast, you will have the wisdom to adjust that timeline if you need to. I am Devin Davis, the guy who lives and writes in a tiny house in Northern Utah. Thank you for tuning in, and please enjoy today's episode of Writing in the Tiny House. Well, hello and happy [00:01:00] Wednesday. It is another episode of writing in the tiny house. And thank you so much for joining me. So like I, well, like I have mentioned in the past couple episodes, my work in progress ti is in a place where it needs beta readers. And if you are in a position where you want to be involved, please let me know by contacting me through my social stuff. So all of that is listed in the show notes. Don't be bashful with beta reading. It's reading in a casual way, just like you would any other novel and then giving feedback. I don't want you to flex your muscles when it comes to editing. We're not to that stage yet. I just want feedback on content, but guys, today is a little bit about what to do in the interim between drafts and beta reading. We are at a point with ti where I have a group of people reading my book [00:02:00] and giving feedback, and they are giving feedback at different rates at different times during the week. And there aren't very many of them, but here's something to understand friends, beta readers are. Wonderful volunteers who are incredibly valuable to the process of writing. However, they are going to require an amount of reminding your book is not nearly as important to them. As it is to you. And if you are in a spot where you are ready for beta readers and you start to get your program together, it's important to spell out to everybody who wants to read your book when you want them to have it finished. And. That you are going to be following up with them throughout the process. It's important to let them know that so that when you pop in halfway through just to see how it's going and they haven't started [00:03:00] yet, they won't be mad and it won't be unexpected. I mean, like I said, these people are not getting paid. They are doing it out of the kindness of their heart. And so it's important to be grateful at the same time, there is an amount of patience with all of this and when you get feedback and that's what this whole episode is for. Well, two things. When you get feedback, you need to have a way to organize all of that. And what are you going to do with yourself during this time? This beta reading program has been going on for about two weeks. And I have said in previous episodes that it is important between drafts to let your draft cool off. That means that you don't get to futz around with it. You don't get to tease it apart. You don't get to pick apart that if different things that are not working or don't seem to be working. And you get to leave it alone. You get to step away and let it cool off. That's what some people call it. At [00:04:00] least when you. Put that time in between you and your current draft, it allows your mind to refresh. And so when you do finally go back and you start to read it, it's going to be with fresh eyes and it's going to be with a fresh mindset so that you can actually do better editing work. during. Your beta reading program. it is important to have that space, that time built into what you are doing. So if you remember a few weeks ago, when I finished my first draft and got it. Readable. I let it rest for a few days. I didn't let it rest for as long as I'm about to let it rest. I mean, this has been almost two weeks. I did just a few days. And then I went through and did a first passive edit. Then I gave it to my friend my developmental editor crystal, and she went through and read it and took notes. And while she was involved with that, I let my [00:05:00] manuscript rest. so that when she had notes to give me, I was in a good place to go through and put in those notes and make those changes. Now that we are at an even better place with the manuscript, I get to let it rest again. So not only am I giving my attention to. Gathering information and compiling it into a meaningful, easy to understand layout. I mean, it's a Novea, it's not a full blown novel. And if I were doing a novel, I would have a different system to take notes with. All of the information that I'll be getting from my beta readers. And I likely wouldn't have given the entire document to them all at once. I would've likely split it up into a couple installments so that I could get fresher feedback that is more specific to what they just read. Instead of giving them a really big book and then getting feedback all at once and having them [00:06:00] forget parts, it's just a way to help them help you. So with a Nove, you don't need to do that. This thing is only 20,000 words. It's only about 125 printed pages or 120, depending on how you format your book, but that's about how long it is. And so there is no harm in just giving the book all at once in this instance. not only am I devoting attention to that, but I am. Paying attention to what the beta readers have to say. And as they give feedback, it also inspires me to make additional changes, but right now is not the time to make those changes. So here's the deal guys. when we come to swapping ideas and whatever, the wheels will start to turn in your brain and you are going to want to dive right back into your manuscript to make those changes. Especially if you get good feedback from one of your beta readers, I gave my book to, a young lady [00:07:00] who read it recently. And some of the feedback that she gave was perfect. she said all of the things that she liked, and then she said some things that she wanted a bit more of. And I can add that into the manuscript, but as I was thinking about it, it triggered a little bit of other places where I could add more to some other scenes in the book where I could insert a little bit of this or that just to fill it out and to give a better sense of who is there a better sense of setting and. That was inspired though. It was not mentioned directly in the feedback that I got recently from one of my beta readers. So this is my advice to you, my dear friends, listening to this episode during these times, when you are letting your manuscript cool off. It is still important to take notes as [00:08:00] far as what your brain is telling you needs to happen with your manuscript. be sure to have a good place. It can be on your phone. It can be a notebook at home. I have a sticky note on my desktop where I'm keeping a lot of these notes, but have a place To write down that inspiration so that you can have a list of points to make when you go through, another time to make more edits to your draft. So with developmental edits, you are going to be making several passes of edits until your book is at a good place to send to your editor. And it's important to make those passes. If you think that you're going to be making all of your developmental edits happen in one go, you are going to be surprised or maybe disappointed when it doesn't happen that way. However, the more that you do it, the more that you practice the [00:09:00] fewer times. Possibly, I mean, most likely fewer times that you were going to have to make passes in order to do some complete developmental edits or. You'll just get better at doing it. So the passes don't take as long and you can be more efficient with your revisions. I was thinking about a metaphor with all of this, with just this whole part of writing. And the thing is the first draft. if we are going to compare this to a garden or to a farm. Or something where we plant a thing and then it grows. The first draft is largely preparing the soil and planting seeds. The first draft is rough and it is hard to see some of the beautiful things in your first draft, especially when you read through it after you're done. I mean, there is problems and. It is through the many steps of revision that we coax out from the ground, the [00:10:00] beautiful things that we want and the beautiful things that are already there. So it's like the seeds and you are growing your flowers or you are growing your vegetables or your pumpkins or whatever else It is the labor and the tending and the weeding and the watering. All of those steps that make those things grow. and all of that comes through revision and through editing and revision, revision revision. And at the end things just get better. Guys. TIS was in a very good place when I sent it to my beta readers. Now that I'm getting feedback, I'm realizing that I didn't realize before that there are other places to make it fill out and to make it even better, to make it make more sense. And that's cool because I can see, I can see where it needs to go and then I can put the effort into it to get there. Again, just to sum all of this up while you are taking a break [00:11:00] from your work in progress and letting it cool off, be sure to still take notes. It's important to create some distance between you and your work in progress for an amount of time. But. It is still important to pay attention and take notes to the things that your brain and other people are going to be telling you about your work in progress. So thank you for tuning in. And that is it for today. Before we go, I need to say that my current work in progress Tiz the next installment of Tales from Vlaydor is ready for beta readers, people to read the novella and share with me their experience. It's a big, important step before publishing. So if you wish to be a part of this project, reach out to me on my social media handles; on Instagram I'm @authordevindavis, and on Twitter I'm @authordevind. And remember that my short story Brigitte is available on Amazon as an ebook [00:12:00] and on Audible as an audio book. Check those out today. /episode/index/show/wthpodcast/id/24222342

Prepping for Betas! 08/24/2022

Bring on the Beta Readers! 08/17/2022

Bring on the Beta Readers! Tiz is ready for beta testing! Reach out to me so you can get involved today! Contact me on social media. “Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon: Become a patron today! Visit Get ahold of Krissy Barton with Little Syllables editing services. She does free sample edits to see if you and she would be the right fit. Instagram: @authordevindavis Twitter: @authordevind The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage. [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the show Writing in the Tiny House. The entire point of this podcast is to help the tormented artist by sharing what I know about writing, publishing, and stress management, so that you can have the tools to produce the content that you have been eager to write. If you have the steps in place, you can produce a short story in as few as three months or a novel in as few as 18. And hopefully through the ideas in this podcast, you will have the wisdom to adjust that timeline if you need to. I am Devin Davis, the guy who lives and writes in a tiny house in Northern Utah. Thank you for tuning in, and please enjoy today's episode of Writing in the Tiny House. Hello? Hello. Hello, [00:01:00] and welcome to the show Writing in the Tiny House. Guys, it's been a really busy summer. How has your summer been? I am doing one last, well, actually, I don't know. It's hard to say just how many passes of a work in progress constitute a session of editing, but I've been doing more content edits more developmental edits for the past while. And I'm feeling really, really good about my work in progress. Tiz is making huge strides toward being just kind of the perfect thing right now. And I'm getting super excited about it. I have a goal to get this round of developmental edits finished by this weekend so that I can move on to beta readers because we are at that point in our lives, my friends. So beta readers are super awesome and they are a huge part of the publishing process if you are professionally [00:02:00] self-publishing. just really quickly. If you already know what a beta reader is, and you want to be a part of my beta reading team, please reach out to me on social media on Instagram. I'm @authordevindavis Davis and on Twitter. I'm @authordevind and I will hook you up that way. If you don't know what a beta reader is, a beta reader is a person who read. A work in progress pretty casually, as casually as you would read anything else that you are reading for entertainment and then simply shares in some way, their experience with the author or whoever is doing the edits for the work that they are involved with. What that looks like. So all of that is well and good, but this is kind of what the process looks like, just because we're all busy. We all have a lot to do. And a lot of people. Oh, I would love to beta read, but they don't fully understand the importance that they are playing in the process. So [00:03:00] usually when a work is to the point of beta reading, it has been through a number of developmental edits. So in my case, I finished the work in progress and then I cleaned it up so that it would be ready for me to actually read. Because if you remember, I dictated my work. And that required a lot of tweaking afterward, which is fine. It, it was not a waste of time. And I was glad that I did it. It got me through, I cleaned it up as a way to just read it, to be able to sit back and read the content. I did my own developmental edits, at least one round of them. And then I sent my story to my developmental editor, crystal and a critique partner as a way to. Have them show me holes that I might have missed. And I have had conversations with both of those people in some way, crystal, we speak on the phone and then this critique partner, she actually sent me a big document [00:04:00] with her thoughts and her notes and her suggestions. And I have paid very close attention to both of those things. Now I'm working through it again, going through the developmental edits again, and things are improving. Things are better. Like the story is starting to bloom and I'm really excited to see that it's such a breath of fresh air to actually see what this can be to me, the magic of writing is in the edits anyway. And so when you crash out your first draft and it looks like garbage because it is garbage, you are tilling the soil and planting seeds, and then it's through the developmental edits that you water the place so that plants can grow. And I'm seeing that with this. So. This is the way a beta reader program works. while you are certainly going to, let's say that you go ahead and you sign up for my beta reader [00:05:00] program, because you are super interested in what I am writing and you want. Part of it. And you want to be involved in this whole process because you love the arts. You love fiction, you love fantasy fiction and how fun to be involved, right. Even if you're not a writer. So what happens is, and, and this is how it, it's a little bit different for every author, but I'm going to show you my. Program here and tell you a little bit about what other programs look like. So beta reading is in essence beta testing. When a person, when a company or when a. Group of people develop a product. They need to test that product to make sure it's something that people want to use. And so if you have been a part of a beta testing trial with new products, what they do is they provide you with the [00:06:00] product so that you can use it. And in fact, they may have some suggestions with specific applications for you to use it So that you can get a full feel of what the product is even for and what it's about. And then at the end, there's always a questionnaire. There is always a way for you to share your experience and offer feedback now with a beta reading program. It's much the same thing. An author is asking a person to read a book. So in my instance, this novella, read it, read it casually, read it as you would. Any other book that you read for entertainment? This is not about studying. This is not about asking you for free editing stuff. This isn't that your role as a beta reader is not to sniff out all of the common mistakes and the misspelled words. It is not to suggest [00:07:00] that this specific sentence would be better if you used this word instead of that word, that's not what beta reading is for. With beta reading, you have a manuscript that is not finished. And so we all just understand right away that it is not a perfect manuscript and there may be typos and little problems in it that you are going to be asked to ignore or to simply read. Through. I mean, if you're reading and there's a, uh, a paragraph where a section that is really problematic, it is really good of you to mention that, but nobody expects you to put on your editing cap and try to flex your grammar muscles, cuz that's, that's not what the beta reader role is. Your role is to read it and then share with the author or whoever is doing the edits experience. If you are [00:08:00] involved with a first time author, it is possible that they may not fully have a program developed. And so they may. Fully understand what sharing your experience needs to look like. It has been my experience with previous beta readers and just with other people who have read my stuff that you read a thing. And then if someone simply says, share with me your experience, you don't really have a lot to say. You just read something, you experienced something, but you don't have words for it yet. So hopefully the program that you're entering into will have questions to kind of probe through your experience so that everybody can get an understanding for what worked, what didn't work. And it's for the big parts of the story. It's for the relationships it's for setting it's for different things. A lot of authors will release [00:09:00] their books, especially if they have written a larger book and they are professionally self-publishing, they will release their book in sections to their beta readers so that they can have conversations fresh with each section of the book. And they can gauge how each section of the book is doing instead of throwing this huge manuscript at somebody and expect them To read it and remember everything as they go through it. So, because TIS is a Nove, it's already a shorter document and there's no need for me to release it in sections. But oftentimes the author will say here's the first section or maybe the first chapter. And then if they are prepared and they know what they're doing, they will have questions ready already for you to respond to. Questions about. How you felt, if there was tension in that specific chapter, if it was working for you, if the love [00:10:00] story is happening in a good way, just whatever the content is. If they know what they are doing, they will ask. Specific questions and they'll have that ready for you to respond. And usually they will ask you to respond in a timely manner. Sometimes it can be a texting conversation. If it's somebody that, you know, on a more personal level, it can be a phone call. It can be something like Marco polo. I don't know if. If you know what that app is, but it's basically video chatting or writing letters, but it's video. , that's how I feel that it is anyway. And you can go through and respond to those questions. It is important for you to be thorough. And it's important for you to be a little bit long winded. super short answers to these questions are certainly helpful, but elaborating. On what you mean by those answers is always more useful, even if [00:11:00] you err, on the side of sharing too much. So sharing all the things, even if you feel all the things is kind of a lot to get through is very, very beneficial to a person who is gauging the content of their story. And then once the beta reading project is over and done with, if it's an author, Has this all worked out, hopefully they are taking notes and they can go through and revise something or tweak something so that they can get ready to send it to their editor next. So this is a very important step in. All works in progress who were becoming professionally published professionally self-published. And so again, if you are interested in joining my program, please reach out to me in social media. And I will, uh, I will announce that again at the end of this episode, here is, what other people's programs can look like sometimes. So a [00:12:00] lot of people will recommend 25. Beta readers to read their work in progress. Sometimes it can be a struggle to find 25 people to read a book, especially if you're releasing a big book. If you're releasing this big epic fantasy thing, that's like 800 printed pages. It can be a lot to find people who can read that in a specific amount of time. Just because if you're releasing on a schedule, you don't have six months for somebody to get around to reading your work in progress with these shorter works like with TIS and with BJE it. Take as long to find people to beta read, just because they are much shorter works. I mean, JE was just 9,000 words. TIS is 20,000 words. It's a proper novella, but they're not long documents. And so people can read them in a shorter amount of time and it's not as big of a [00:13:00] time commitment. with many people, they suggest 25 beta readers and. I know of some authors who go as high as 45 beta readers. I have some mixed feelings about that. I do feel that you will flesh out absolutely everything. If you can get 45 people to read your work and respond to your thing. I also know that keeping notes on everybody's thoughts would be pretty tedious and a lot of people would end up sharing. The same things over and over again. And if you want to endure that 45 times, then that's fine. I don't think that I'm going to be searching out 45 people to read ti. Also with my particular program, I like to release it to a small number of people get their input. And if there are glaring problems, I like to do another round of edits in order to fix those problems. If I agree with them and then release it to [00:14:00] the next set of beta readers so that the manuscript can be continually improv. Before I send it off to my editor. So that's just kind of what the program looks like. That's what a program looks like. That's what beta readers are for beta readers are a huge part to the development of a book, and like I said, it is beta testing to see if the book would land well, if people would like it, if people would buy it. And if the content is something that would stick around and come across as something important. So beta readers are super a big deal. And this is why all authors are super grateful for their beta reading team. And that is it for today. Before we go, I need to say that my current work in progress Tiz the next installment of Tales from Vlaydor is ready for beta readers, people to read [00:15:00] the novella and share with me their experience. It's a big, important step before publishing. So if you wish to be a part of this project, reach out to me on my social media handles; on Instagram I'm @authordevindavis, and on Twitter I'm @authordevind. And remember that my short story Brigitte is available on Amazon as an ebook and on Audible as an audio book. Check those out today. /episode/index/show/wthpodcast/id/24079893

Writing in the Tiny House

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