PUBLISHING STAGE
After a year (2006), I finally received a letter from Gramedia confirming that my novel manuscript had been accepted. I was so excited, I started writing lots of new premises.
That year, I wrote a story called Royal Flush. At the time, I was a Taiwanese drama fan, so I enjoyed editing celebrity photos into playing cards using Adobe Photoshop.
Since I wanted to learn screenwriting, I wrote Royal Flush in screenplay form. I only learned screenplay terms from the screenplay book “Ada Apa dengan Cinta” (What’s Up with Love), which I bought because a friend said it was good.
I never researched or formally studied screenplay terms, because I thought I was just writing because I liked it and I had no plans to submit it to a publisher.
I posted Royal Flush on the Indosiar forum. At first, people thought it was a real Taiwanese series because I made the DVD cover using Adobe Photoshop, lol…
This story has its own thread, and some regular readers even wanted to become characters in the story. Those were truly enjoyable times, until episode 8, when I stopped writing because it turned out the story I was writing was a coming-of-age story, and I wasn’t an adult myself. How could I write a story about someone learning to grow up? Haha…
Meanwhile, the editing process for my teenlit novel took about four years, so it was published in 2010.