Revisiting a shelved manuscript? Here’s how I did it.

Mike Chen
10 min readJul 12, 2021
What manuscripts are sitting on your digital shelves?

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.

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Mike Chen

Mike Chen is a Bay Area-based writer of critically acclaimed science fiction. He also covers geek culture and used to cover the NHL. He loves dogs very much.