The above images depict the thing I'm doing on my computer: I'm trashing the original Darkness Surrounding and starting over.
The process? It's fucking liberating.
It's taken me a long time to be able to let go of the Darkness Surrounding I wrote when I was fourteen. I don't know why. I mean, I sure didn't know how to write a solid novel at that age. (Chances are that I still don't, but I digress.) More importantly, I didn't know how to write interesting characters. It took an honest one-star review and some soul-searching for me to realize that I wasn't the pinnacle of YA literature—I was a wishful thinker who rushed into publishing way too damn soon. I tried, at age seventeen, to salvage something that should have been trashed shortly after it was written. My main character had no personality, my story was boring, and very little of the epic masterpiece I had created in my head translated to the page. Not even close, you guys.
Anyway, I'm glad that some people enjoyed and were inspired by the original Darkness Surrounding. It just wasn't the story I needed to tell.
You can follow my progress with Darkness Surrounding 3.0 on www.ataviststrilogy.com.
P.S. I pulled DS from Amazon and other distributors in early 2012.
what you did here takes a lot of guts. I get so attached to my writing I have trouble scrapping paragraphs let alone starting over like you did. good luck!
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