Coming this week: The Littlest Frost Fairy

I cannot tell you how many revisions I have done, or how many hours I have poured into this book. And I thought children's books were supposed to be easier to write! For goodness sake, this is a 30 page picture book, how hard can it be?

Just because it is shorter than a novel, does not mean it is easier to write or that less work goes into it. I made so many changes and revisions, I lost count. Sometimes it was just a word here, and a word there, other times it felt as though I had replaced every other word.

Then, I would look at my revisions, shake my head, and change them all back. Sometimes I'd go back and forth several times.

I read the story to myself, read aloud, read to my kids, read using fairy voices. I changed words, rearranged sentences, combined pages, separated pages, and all around beat myself (and my book) nearly to death.

Finally, it was done. Complete. Perfect! As close to perfect as my feeble brain could get.

Then I waited for the rest of the illustrations to be perfected. While I was waiting, I sent the manuscript to my editor. She didn't tear it to pieces, but did suggest some changes. But it seemed that for everything I changed, something else didn't sound quite right. Together we got it to an even more "perfect" state.

When the illustrations were finally ready and I went to put it all together, my nearly perfect manuscript had big problems. I hated the first page. Something was wrong with it. It was an incoherent jumble of words with no rhythm or pace.

So, after my editor and I had spent weeks perfecting what was there, I changed it...the whole first page. And then I loved it liked it again.

Then I did that for the whole book, except I mostly only changed a word or two here and there.

I was worried that I might have made grammatical errors, since my editors did not see these changes, but I sent it to my beta readers anyway.

And...I had made some grammatical errors and typos. Lucky for me, someone pointed them out, while at the same time complimenting my book. Ok, so the positive here is that a handful of beta readers did not hate it!

I'm busy working on implementing the changes suggested, and plan to publish this week. I'm certain there is such a thing as over-editing, but I want my book to be as good as it possibly can. This time next year, I will hopefully be an even better writer, but for now, it's the best I can make it.

After waiting so long to share it with the world, I'm nervous, but excited that it is finally ready.

Look for the e-book later this week on Amazon.