My Beta Reading Journey (A Hawaiian Summer)

 Writing 

Hello, lovely friend! 

I can’t believe October is almost over! Autumn is leaving, and I feel winter coming where I live. The temperature has dropped and now all the cozy blankets come out with sweatshirts and cozy socks. I’m starting to crave Christmas music, books, and movies, but I’m holding myself back until November. 

The end of October also signifies the end of #preptober and the coming of NaNoWriMo, a month where writers all over the world come together to write a full-length novel (50,000 words) in one month. I am not writing a book in this NaNoWriMo. I am going to be outlining and working on editing A Hawaiian Summer and A Pumpkin Hill Story. 

Something special is that November marks the one-year anniversary of when I wrote my first book. It is a special time for me because I didn’t think I could write a book before November. I never thought it could be a currier but now I can’t imagine not writing and not pursuing this path. I love writing and I don’t believe I will ever stop. 

Now, I want to give you all an update on beta reading. Last Friday, I started my first round of beta readers! It has been so incredible and I am so thankful for the team I have! 

My Beta Reading Journey with A Hawaiian Summer 

This beta reading process has been SO fun and rewarding. I haven’t talked about this much anywhere else so I thought this was a timely post. 

I am very happy to say there will be no major rewrites in this book! Hurray! There have been some misspelled words and grammar things I will be going over with my betas but as far as story, development, and characters go, THEY LOVE IT!!!! There have been NO PLOT HOLES! This is such a relief! 

The reaction I have had from them has been incredible! For this first round, I chose people I knew I could trust not only with this story but with my heart. This book is EXTREMELY personal. In a lot of places, it is more like an autobiography than fiction. I have to trust the people I hand this book to. I have found that I actually have a sort of qualification process for who I choose. For this round, I had my sister, mom, and dad beta read for me. This isn’t just sentimental, this is strategic on my part. I do trust them completely but they each bring something special to this process that I cannot do alone. 

This was actually a very fast process. The book was ready almost a month before I thought it would get here. Then on the day I got it, my betas started reading. Less than a week after I got the books, two of my betas are done and the last is halfway through. I am in awe of how fast this has gone. 

Some of the highlights are: 

Scarlett (my sister) read this book in THREE DAYS. When she finished she came to tell me and burst into tears. She told me how much she loved the book and the characters! It was such an honor that she cried (happy tears) over my book. Scarlett doesn’t cry at books often, only a handful of times, and for that to be her reaction to MY BOOK was incredible. I think that was my favorite moment. 

My mom (@abigailaviva & https://www.abigailaviva.com) read my book in five days! That is incredible because this isn’t a genre she would normally read which I would expect to make a longer reading process but it didn’t. She was drawn into the story (the best feeling as a writer) and loved my story and characters. 

My dad (@understateproject) is almost finished with my book. I have loved the conversations I’ve gotten to have with him and seeing how much he likes my book. I know he isn’t just saying that because he is my dad, I know when he says he likes a book, he likes it, and if he doesn’t then he will say that. 

I’m so happy with their responses!!! This is my first time having my work read like this! I’m so happy! 

A note on writing faith into a story (a conversation I had with my dad) 

I think one of my favorite things I and my dad talked about that was really validating to my writing was my faith content. In A Hawaiian Summer, faith is a part of the story. Something I loved was that my dad liked that content. He said that he was prepared to cringe at the moments of faith (from past books getting too preachy), but he didn’t with mine. He said it felt genuine and it mattered to the story and characters. 

That is so amazing to me because I have read books where it felt…ingenuine. It would feel like what was being said about faith didn’t actually MATTER to the characters. It didn’t change the characters, it wasn’t a part of their values, and it wasn’t a part of their lives. With books like that, sadly I feel like the faith should have been left out. I know how horrible that sounds, but I would rather have a good story than a story that wants to be labeled “Christian” but is meaningless. Faith should not be meaningless. If people write something into a story then it should have meaning. You wouldn’t show the reader that a character has magic powers that could change the world, but they never use them (you could, but it would be extremely disappointing). 

I want to talk about this more in another post but for now, I’m going to leave it at this for now. 

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Thank you all for reading and listening to these updates on my writing! Make sure to meet me in the comments so we can chat! If you have any questions feel free to ask, I always answer comments! 

Discussion Time

Thank you for reading this blog post! I hope you liked this look into my writing and beta reading process! 

I want to hear from you! Meet me in the comments and tell me what you thought about this post! How has October treated you? Are you going to be participating in NaNoWriMo? I would love to chat! 

If you have any questions or want to talk, make sure to comment down below or find me on Instagram @fablerosemc!  

Be sure to subscribe to this blog to stay in the know because I post new content here every week. 

XOXO Moriyah 💛