The First Novel

This past January I sat down and made my first New Year's Resolution: Finish the book by July or give up on it and move on.

I almost moved on...feeling that the story was too complex to move it further without confusing myself and the reader, especially after writing it on and off for five years. Pieces would contradict itself and the characters sounded like they didn't know what they were talking about. Some days, like today, even though I finished, I would need to go back five or more pages to read where I was in the story. Some days I wouldn't even move the story forward but work on editing, which would make me frustrated because I wasn't advancing the story.

The story started out with this complex theme of "what if God sent a prophet, but it's abilities were split between two people?" and I ended up throwing that into the fire and starting anew with fourty or so pages already written.

After these five years, I finally finished my first novel. Now comes the hard part, editing. Some may say that a book is done when it's been edited and set up for publication, but any artist will understand that a work is never done, especially writers. They will sit down and edit the hell out of their work.

Then, what should I do next? Self publish? Find an agent to sell my book? Work on some short stories and get those out there first?

Well, if I self publish, would you buy it and read it?