Promises to Keep

Remember how I was in the final stages of editing Promises to Keep? Well, silly me never backed it up and it was a casualty in the Great Puter Crash of 09. Good news; I still had to original draft saved on my mom's external hard drive and I had a notebook of hand written edits. Within the last couple of days I have gone through P2K, making corrections and backing it up and printing up the latest draft. And I can say, with a huge smile on my face, that this novella is almost ready to be submitted to various markets (the first being Eternal Press because they were awesome to work with). And while it isn't my best/favorite story, P2K will be my greatest accomplishment.

Why?

Synopsis: Starlette DeFore knows that her father is alive, even though her family buried him ten years ago. And when a faerie confirms this she travels to Charleston, South Carolina to hunt down Sivad Night, the only person to have ever escaped from the hands of a powerful sorceress, The Dark Lady Dreashae. With help from a witch they travel into the Myst, a fantasy realm filled with centaurs, dragons, and magic. Starlette is very close to finding her father, but first she must defeat Dreashae. Will Starlette, a mere mortal, have the strength needed to finish her quest and save her father?

When I was a naieve freshman in high school, I wrote the original draft of this story entitled The Quest to Twin Towers. I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread and submitted it to various literary agents. No one picked it up and years later, when I was participating in NaNoWriMo 2006, I knew why. The dialogue - not believable. The description - craptastic. TQ2TT was my first "novel" writing venture, and it bombed. But the plot...that had a lot of potential. So, in 2006, I sat down for NaNoWriMo and used the original draft of TQ2TT as an outline. Out came Promises to Keep, a 31,000 word novella (It was originally 53,000 words, but a lot of it was filler junk. You NaNo writers know what I mean). The characters are the same, I think two scenes are the same, but 99.3% of it was brand new.

With my editing, it's now down to 28,000 words. I cut out the elves (filler) and changed Dreashae from a faerie noble into a sorceress (her powers were just too similar to the sorcerers in my short stories). Instead of the Myst being a faerie kingdom separated into two courts, I have the Myst just the name of the fantasy realm that they are in. A lot has changed with this story in ten years. I now use TQ2TT as a way to show my how my writing has grown. And hell yeah, it has grown...