Time to take an axe to book 1

The re-write of the Queen of Vorn is underway!  If you aren’t one of my devoted fans you may be wondering what The Queen of Vorn is all about.  You may only be reading this blog because you have clicked a link to my website expecting to find some awesome author who’s been published by Bloomsbury and is the next J.K Rowling…um, sorry to disappoint.  If you aren’t in the Charlotte Goodwin fan club just yet, you may not be aware that The General’s Son isn’t my first book.  
 
Silence.  A pause while my audience gasps.
 
I actually wrote my first novel about twelve or so years ago.  It was a YA novel about a teenage girl who had to save a Pegasus from an evil queen.  I tried to get it published.  I failed.  I gave up on writing…until October 2021 when I started again.  With a vengeance.
 
After a holiday where I’d got back into reading and a return to a job where I was bored, I decided to fill my time with scribbling down a novel that had been rattling around my head since soon after I gave up on my first.  By Christmas of that year I’d finished the first draft.  Then the sequel followed, then a third book was spawned.  I’d completed all three hundred thousand or so words of The Homecoming Trilogy by around May last year.  And I missed my characters, so The Offspring Trilogy was born.
 
It’s a stand-alone trilogy, set some twenty years after the first.  I’d finished drafting this one by September 2022.  Then there was editing and covers and all the rest of it; my first book hit the market in March this year.
 
Anyway, I digress.  I’m here to talk about book one, um, that is the second book I wrote.  AKA book one of The Homecoming Trilogy, the story of how Emma took back her throne.
 
“How Emma took back her throne,” I’ve quoted this bit because if you were to read my original draft, a few chapters in you would probably be thinking “hang on, this book sounds like its more about a girl called Lila,” and you’d be correct.
 
Back in Autumn 2021, I was a young, naïve author who didn’t really know how to write books.  I had a rough idea of how my story would look and I just started writing.  I wrote.  I enjoyed it.  I finished.  I realised that I’d spent far too long going on about Lila and her back-story, but my book was my baby; I couldn’t bear to take an axe to almost half of it.
 
But now I have.  I’ve written another five books since the Queen of Vorn was drafted.  I’ve learnt how to plot a book.  I think I have half an idea what I’m doing when it comes to writing now, and I’ve sharpened my literary blade.  The axe has swung, The Queen of Vorn has been well and truly mutilated.
 
I hacked it, chopped it, then took a load of pieces and binned them.  I grabbed a load more and re-jigged them.  Then I realised there were some gaps and I came up with a plan to fill them with more cool stuff.  Now I’m in the process of stitching them all back together.
 
I’ve often thought, in another life, where I had rich parents who actually supported me properly to get a decent education, I might have become a surgeon.  I think I’d have quite enjoyed the intricate work of fixing the human body.  That’s not really an option for me now, I can’t be a medical surgeon, but perhaps I can be a literary surgeon?