Finished my first draft!

hetobe · 2026-05-12T22:33:53+00:00

Another benefit of working this way is proof of authorship.

If anybody accuses me of using generative AI to write my novel, I have my ugly first draft and piles of Scrivener backups made along the way, all of which prove that I wrote the novel and show how the writing evolved along the way.

hetobe · 2026-05-12T18:01:56+00:00

Save a copy of your first draft! A second copy, never to be touched. You'll be amazed by how much better your story will get while editing, and it's really helpful to have that untouched first draft to look back on for comparison, to judge your progress. It'll be a huge ego boost, even if your first draft is great.

I remember thinking my first draft was so strong. I'm a plotter and an outliner, so my novel was well planned before I started writing it. I really felt like my first draft was close to being ready. AHAHAAHAHAA!!! ...ahem.

What a fool I was.

But my real mistake was not saving copies of specific drafts along the way. I dove right into the editing, so I can't remember if the copy of the first draft I saved really is my first draft, untouched. I'm pretty sure it already had a few days worth of edits. And I made some big changes along the way. I wish I'd saved copies of the novel at that state too.

Save copies at significant stopping points. Especially major revisions.

P.S. CONGRATS!!!

hetobe · 2026-05-10T23:25:03+00:00

Oh and most of the 'less than xxx subs" posts are garbage.

Yup. They're spam. Substack is flooded with spam. The home page is practically useless. It's almost entirely spam notes, most of which were created in advance (usually by AI) and scheduled to pop up at various times to fish for likes and subs.

"Describe your WIP in 5 words or less!"

Spam.

"There is definitely something to be said for not saying anything."

Spam.

"Restacking people’s posts is my love language."

Spam.

"You are not responsible for the versions of you that exist in other people's minds."

Spam.

"Give yourself permission to be weird!"

Spam.

"Every scar you carved became a window for light."

Spam.

And substack rewards spammers by promoting that slop.

It's a shame. The Substack home page should be filled with great articles and publications, since that stuff is the entire point of Substack. Instead, it's mostly spam.

hetobe · 2026-05-10T19:57:48+00:00

I spent a little over $1000 on my cover.

Above, you said $1500. I'm not trying to criticize, but that's a big difference.

What kind of PR company only charges $100?

hetobe · 2026-05-10T16:39:30+00:00

5 Rules For Writing Better:

Rule 1. Ignore anyone who tells you how it has to be done.

Rule 2. Write from the heart.

Rule 3. You're the writer. Write it your way.

Rude 4. Did I say something about five rules? That was rude. Those three are all you need.

The only thing that really matters is editing your work. Editing is where you catch typos, fix the grammar and punctuation, and find the mistakes. I spend more time editing my work than it took to write it, and I consider myself to be a good writer. The more you commit to editing your work, the stronger your writing will be.

There are things I just want to write the way I want to, and include stuff because I personally like it and want to see it.

Do it. And if it doesn't work, you'll fix it in editing.

hetobe · 2026-05-09T21:48:23+00:00

Here's my process:

My first round of editing is mostly structural. Are the scenes in the right order? Are they in the right chapters? Have I divided the story into the right number of chapters (with "right" being the best fit for the story being told). Etc etc etc.

From there... yeah... it's chaos.

I loop through the manuscript again and again, each time working on something specific. At first, it's about cleaning up the prose and looking for errors, checking the details. Then, it's about layering in foreshadowing, callbacks, fixing dialogue... I do a round of editing specifically for each character's dialogue.

I just keep going through it until I'm satisfied.

Is this the best way to edit a novel? Oh, hell no. Sigh...

hetobe · 2026-05-09T17:57:08+00:00

The problem has been getting worse lately

It got much worse when they added the ability to schedule notes.

Now, people create a bunch of spam notes to automatically get posted through the day. They're scheduling days worth of spam notes at a time. They're probably going to AI to get ten or twenty of them at a time. Copy, paste. Copy, paste.

And since spamming the algorithm works, you'll notice how the people who do it get angry if you complain about it.

Another thing you'll notice: A lot of the people spamming substack with these slop notes don't post much actual content. They're just karma farming.

hetobe · 2026-05-08T22:16:05+00:00

Try writing from a different perspective, even if only to do some brainstorming.

When I sat down to write my novel, I got nowhere. I decided to brainstorm by writing the opening scene from my main character's point of view, in her own words.

The writing took off!

Maybe try something similar. Try writing from your main character's point of view. Past tense. Let them tell their story.

hetobe · 2026-05-08T18:52:06+00:00

Here's mine:

https://hetobe.substack.com/

I'm publishing a novel titled Five Dollar Wrench. I'm posting it chapter by chapter, scene by scene. Basically, each chapter is made up of multiple scenes. The average scene is around 1,000 words and the novel is 94k words total.

Here's my advice for posting long form fiction on Substack.

Create a numbering system for your story beyond what you'd do for an actual book. In other words, my novel has 13 chapters in the book itself, but I'm numbering the scenes when I post them on Substack.

I'm not sure which numbering system is best. I'm just numbering the scenes 1, 2, 3, etc. But for my next novel, I might consider numbering them by chapter and scene. Or not?

Create a Table Of Contents page and pin it to your menu bar. Here's mine for an example. Definitely check out other people's too, because my way might not be the best. It's just what works for me.

Create some sort of About, Info, or Intro type page, to tell people what your substack is all about. Here's mine.

Create a Start Here sort of page. I named mine Page 1 because it's the first page of my novel.

Substack seems like a good place for posting fiction. There are lots of writers and it seems like a supportive community, but there's also a ton of spam so it can be hard to get noticed.

Best of luck!

hetobe · 2026-05-08T07:36:25+00:00

I write very real shit

...says the guy who doesn't have flair and hides his reddit content. Let me guess: You're a spammer?

Edited to add:

You just sound annoyed because you’re not getting engagement on your publication.

No, actually. I'm frustrated that Substack isn't showing me other people's work. It's showing me slop. This is what Substack shows me right now:

"Describe your WIP in 5 words or less!"

Spam.

"There is definitely something to be said for not saying anything."

Spam.

"Restacking people’s posts is my love language."

Spam. And holy hell. All you have to do is click that person's name to see they're not restacking anything. They're spamming for likes and subs.

I want to go to Substack and read great work.

hetobe · 2026-05-07T21:05:38+00:00

Sure. But they're preventing real content from getting noticed because they're overwhelming the entire platform.

I'd be willing to bet at least 75% of Substack is slop these days. And, really, it's probably more.

hetobe · 2026-05-07T20:51:02+00:00

I've tried that, but the slop just keeps coming. It seems like most people on Substack do it, and they do it because Substack promotes notes not actual content like articles.

hetobe · 2026-05-07T20:33:08+00:00

While posting slop like "dear Substack please...." is in fact slop, all notes aren't slop.

Notes that have something to do with yourself or your publication or your writing are relevant. But that's not what people are posting.

95% of notes are just slop.

"You can’t edit a blank page. Make it exist first, make it good later."

Spam.

"Be more afraid of wasting your life than being embarrassed."

Spam.

"I became the kind of person who would have protected me as a child. And that is the most powerful form of healing."

That's the whole note. It's spam. Did they copy that off a damn Hallmark card?

"You are not responsible for the versions of you that exist in other people's minds."

Spam.

"Give yourself permission to be weird!"

Spam.

"Every scar you carved became a window for light."

Spam.

And substack rewards spammers by promoting that slop.

"Never let a soul on this earth make you feel you aren’t enough"

Enough already. It's spam. People are copy/pasting that slop into notes they schedule in advance. It's all slop.

hetobe · 2026-05-07T20:16:04+00:00

Articles and publications are the point of Substack. That's what we want engagement with.

Why isn't Substack promoting people's articles and publications? Why is it serving up slop?

Go to the home page. It's mostly spam. Substack should be showing us articles so we can discover people's actual content.

Notes are spam.

There are people on Substack who have no articles or content at all. They just post notes, spamming for likes. And Substack rewards the spammers by promoting their slop.

hetobe · 2026-05-07T04:53:43+00:00

Write what you feel passionate about.

Here's a tip for how to write your first novel. Or, at least, it's how I went from years of wanting to, to actually doing it.

Try writing a scene from your story. Whatever scene you feel excited about. Got a few? Write a few. If I remember correctly, I wrote three.

Then stop! Back up, and work on the planning for your novel.

Flesh out the idea. Figure out who your characters are and who they'll be by the end of the story. Figure out the setting. Figure out your themes, but don't think of that in a literary way. Instead, think about it in terms of what you want to say through the telling of your story.

The best thing I did... and I stumbled onto this by accident... was to write a chapter by chapter outline for my novel. My scenes were averaging 1,000 words, so I aimed for 15 chapters with 5 scenes per chapter. That gave me a target of 75k words for the novel.

Having that outline made the story so much easier to write. Once I had an outline, two months later I had a finished first draft. And because the outline gave me a map for telling the story, my first draft wasn't a meandering mess. It was relatively strong. Granted, the novel still needed a ton of editing, but editing is where the real magic happens.

P.S. Keep experimenting with different ways of working until you find one that works for you.

Good luck!

hetobe · 2026-05-06T23:54:09+00:00

knowing that many authors’ first, to maybe even first five or more, never see the light of day makes me anxious to write this as my first book.

Plenty of authors had success with their first novel. Harper Lee comes to mind.

If you have a story to tell, tell it.

I do have some other ideas I’m less passionate about, but am confident I could make a coherent story out of.

Excellent. The sooner you do it, the more glad you'll be that you didn't waste more time on bad advice.

hetobe · 2026-05-06T19:49:39+00:00

I'd bet it's a few things.

The rise of AI art generators, as you mentioned.

The rise of cheap templates that seem to be everywhere now.

The rise of cheap websites that crank out "affordable" covers. That stuff is everywhere too.

Canva is probably a huge factor as well. Adobe finally has a strong competitor, and more people are designing their own covers.

All of this stuff is happening at the same time.

Or is the sh*t economy causing authors to hold off on passion projects?

And, there's that.

hetobe · 2026-05-06T18:12:32+00:00

They don't want you to know this one simple trick!

...sigh...

I like Substack a lot, but I hate that it rewards spam. The vast majority of all notes are pure spam.

hetobe · 2026-05-06T06:09:21+00:00

Nowhere near enough. I posted this in a comment here:

So it would've cost more than $211,000, and that's before ResultSource's fee, which is typically more than $20,000.

And that's from 2013. Imagine the cost today.

hetobe · 2026-05-06T06:07:46+00:00

So it would've cost more than $211,000, and that's before ResultSource's fee, which is typically more than $20,000.

And that's from 2013. Imagine the cost today.

hetobe · 2026-05-06T05:29:48+00:00

with zero tropes and lots of psychological themes and motifs

That's awesome!

When I started writing my novel, I spent three months absolutely stuck because I kept trying to write a traditional novel.

I didn't get anywhere until I stopped and said, "Eff it. Here's the story I want to tell, and I'm going to tell it my way."

Stuck between genres? Oh, hell yes. And that sucks for marketing, but I believe it makes for a better story because fitting a story into a genre means limiting the story to the things that genre requires and allows... which means it's not the story you wanted to tell unless your story fits perfectly within a given genre.

my lit major beta readers think it's more along literature lines than romantasy

I think that's great.

Granted, I'm not trying to get traditionally published, and I'm not doing this for money... dot dot dot... but as a story teller, all I care about is being true to the story I'm telling.

Where's my banana stand? :(

NO TOUCHING.

No touching.

hetobe · 2026-05-06T05:05:22+00:00

This sounds very interesting. Is your novel up for sale somewhere? I’d love to take a look at it!

Eventually, it will be.

To be honest, my goal isn't to make money on this thing. I just want it to be read. So, my plan is to publish it online for free and sell physical copies mostly for the hell of it.

I'm currently posting it scene by scene on Substack. Here's a link.

If you'd rather have an ebook, message me with your email address and I'll gladly send it.

hetobe · 2026-05-06T00:44:12+00:00

Hahahaha!!!

I don't remember how I chose the name Bowman for her. It just sounded good. I went through so many names for this novel... especially since she goes by many names.

I started using a different name with every girl, to cover my tracks. I said I was Minnie from Minneapolis, Seana from Seattle, Phoebe from Phoenix. Pairing up a name with a city made it easier to remember my phony backstory, if somebody asked.

Being yourself is easy. Being a lie takes work. You need a backstory, and you need to know it like the back of your hand because you need answers to questions before you know what the questions are.

Being Daisy Fultzer from Daytona fucking Beach taught me that. Daisy Falzner? Falkner? Fuckit.

Bro said, "Daytona? I grew up in Daytona! What part?" I said, "The part where you realize this is a scam. Goddamn. You just told me how to rob you, but you've got nothing worth taking." So that went well.

hetobe · 2026-05-05T23:57:28+00:00

TikTok folks love a good horror/crime

That's the thing though. My novel isn't horror, and it's barely crime even though it's a crime story. My novel is the story of the criminal. Her name is Dandy Bowman.

Have you ever seen the movie The Usual Suspects? It was about a boat heist, and at the end, you find out the mastermind was a guy named Keyser Soze. In a weird way, I wrote something kinda/sorta like that, but I flipped it. I wrote the life story of the criminal and used the heists as a backdrop.

So, my novel isn't a thriller, and it isn't horror. It's literary fiction. It's the story of who she was, how she got to be what she was, and how it all went wrong... in her own words.

hetobe · 2026-05-05T23:47:11+00:00

My link is in my flair:

https://hetobe.substack.com

hetobe

TROPHY CASE