Member-only story
In 2013, I’d finally decided to put my manuscript entitled The Pause on the digital shelf. It’d been about two years, countless revisions, and a lot of literary TLC, and though it had drawn some attention from agents, in the end it wasn’t quite good enough — despite how much I’d felt I’d grown as a writer in the two years I’d worked on it. I opened a blank document and started something new.
This story is typical for authors. There’s often at least one manuscript-of-their-heart that’s been lingering around from their early writing days and gone through countless rewrites. But when those get reviewed with fresh eyes years later, it’s usually with a sympathetic shrug and a sigh, a “well, that was part of my learning curve” admission.
All of that rang true with A Beginning At The End. It was part of my learning curve, one of the first manuscripts I’d written and my first attempt at literary science fiction. The early versions were rough, scattered, with all-over-the-place pacing and elements that didn’t work. And yet, through the hardest revision of my life, this story of “a wedding planner in the apocalypse” hit store shelves in January of 2020. It’s living proof that no manuscript is ever truly shelved — but getting there is significantly harder than simply writing a new manuscript.
