Season 2, Episode 1: The One Where We Welcome a New Coach to the Show!

Starting your revision is a great place to pick up a book coach. Or, Abby and Mel’s case, a great time to change coaches and get a fresh pair of eyes on your work. Today Jennie and Abby want to introduce listeners to Kemlo Aki, a senior book coach at Author Accelerator. Does Kemlo’s voice sound familiar? It should because she was on a (very) early episode of Mom Writes!

Welcome, Kemlo! You can read more about Kemlo on her personal website, which you can find here. You can also see her coach page on the Author Accelerator website (and listen to a tiny interview where she talks about why she loves coaching) if you click here.

Mom Writes is following the typical developmental process of a writer(s) coming into a novel, from scratch and all the way through to a polished manuscript. And right now we are starting REVISION!

Jennie talks about how revision is SO critical, and that if your book isn’t finding traction in this world, this is most likely the place where things went wrong. They haven’t revised correctly. Listen as she talks about the bravery of revision.

Revision isn’t copy editing and making pretty sentences. That comes WAY later. Revision is still looking at big structural elements and spending time to circle around your story, revisiting it, making it the best it can be.

You have to look at your story and be totally honest. What do you really have? Did it capture the vision you wanted?

So how do you determine that? Surprise, surprise. Jennie (Queen of the Process) has a process for that. In the next episode, Jennie shows us how to identify the big, fatal things in our WIP that, if left unfixed, will break a manuscript.