On finishing drafts and all that happened before that

Hello! I’m back with a substantial writing update!

I FINISHED THE DRAFT OF MEAH’S BOOK.

*screaming and crying*

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I’ve struggled with this book for years. I started working on her story soon after I published Keep the Faith, and checking my files, the earliest file was first created in 2016. That’s almost a whole decade ago. I went through three titles before I settled on the final one, two different love interests, and three love interest names. And while I did finish the whole draft of this in 2018 and thought it would finally see the light of day in 2019 (even announced it for MIBF) but life happened and if I were to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t very happy about that version.

Then the pandemic happened and at first I thought it would be the perfect time to work on the book and get it to shape. But as we all know, that time zapped us all of creative energy and I was personally very burnt out, so I barely even opened it. I also got sick (more about this story in a previous newsletter), and that pretty much knocked out other things on my list until I started to get better.

I only picked it up again when I attended AprilFeelsDay in 2023. I talked about it briefly here, but being with #RomanceClass really helped revive the motivation and I got inspired to write again. The original draft had a lot of problems that I think I was overthinking, so when I wrote it again, I decided that I had to focus on enjoying the process, and giving myself permission to stop when it starts to feel like a chore or when there’s too much pressure. I think that helped a lot, because I did stop writing for a while when I questioned myself too much. I went back several times and almost rewrote the whole thing, wondering if it should be dual POV (spoiler, it’s not…but also it is?), and because I spent so much time with it, I started to question their chemistry. But I think the breaks helped, too, because every time I start to doubt myself, I’d reread it and realize that it’s not so bad? And maybe I am overthinking reactions of people who haven’t even seen this, and hello, it’s not like it won’t be edited.

Sometime in December 2023, when all the BTS members enlisted, I told myself that my goal is to finish writing this before they reunited. (Actually, I wrote finish writing AND publish the book but haha let’s be realistic :P) I have been posting about it on my Instagram for a while because I kept swinging from Act 2 to Act 3 but after making some executive decisions on cutting out scenes that was in the original draft, I got closer to The End, and it was just a matter of pushing through even if I didn’t like it 100%. I think that’s where I kept stumbling — I can’t seem to leave a chapter alone when I’m not super satisfied with it, so I kept going back. I may have edited the last chapter several times and procrastinated on writing the Epilogue because the original one I had written down didn’t feel right…But I finally finished it, just in time for Suga’s discharge date! WOHOO!

But I think the most important part of me finally finishing this version of the draft is I’m happy about this. I think at the end of the day, we authors need to write the books that make us happy first before we try to make any reader happy. It becomes less of a chore to write and work on it when we like what we’re writing. Like I think I could confidently say to myself that Meah’s book is something that I would read and pick up myself, if I didn’t write it. And there’s probably readers like me out there, right?

Anyway, I just wanted to pop in here to give you an update on this because I want to celebrate. There’s still work ahead, of course, so the book won’t be out super soon, but I’ll keep you posted. 🙂