Confidence and enthusiasm at low ebb today. Bleh. 

Partly this is because I am tired, having unwisely stayed up past midnight working on rewrites.

Mostly, though, rewriting just kind of sucks.

This is pretty apt, except that I’m not sure all the bits and pieces go back together in the tidy mechanical fashion of gears and cogs and springs. A better metaphor might be surgery. On zombies. With hacksaws. It’s like I’ve taken a limb and chopped it into little gobbets that I’m now trying to stitch back together in a different order. The monstrousness of the result seems guaranteed.

Things I am trying to remind myself of:

* I have been through this stage before. I rejigged the opening not too long ago in response to contest feedback, and it was brutal. I had to peel back the nice stylistic veneer to get at the working parts and then layer it all back on once I had them functioning again in their new places. For a couple of iterations the revised version looked downright barbarous. It is OK for it to look barbarous at first. This can be worked upon. This time it will probably take longer, is all, since it involves ~40 pages instead of ~10.

* This is part of the process, and everyone’s gotta do it. Even – especially! – the pros. 

I do it at work all the time, too, after all – just usually on a much smaller scale. See above re. 40 pages. I am not going to turn this around as fast as I do a promotional email.

* Kids going camping with grandma next week will coincide with a couple of vacation days I’d forgotten I booked. So I can spend HOURS AT A STRETCH on this next week, completely uninterrupted. Dealing with All The Other Things this week need not sink me into the quagmire of time starvation.

* Lack of sleep will not help me come up with fresh verbs and musical sentence structure, to say nothing of focusing on the dayjob or being patient with the kids. Shoring up spoons is a legitimate use of my time.

* Having to break out the hacksaw does not make the positive elements of the feedback I’ve received any less encouraging. If nothing else, those positive comments reassure me that my once-barbarous opening is now operating at a high shine, and if I can achieve that once, I can by god do it again.

Here's a toast to a first book that shall remain nameless.

It was a YA novel just shy of 70K about three kids who find themselves suddenly transported to the world they made up. I first had the idea in 1996 or thereabouts while improvising stories from random objects with a couple of guy friends after school; I finally shut the drawer on it in 2007 after – if I recall correctly – about two dozen rejection letters.

It’s been a while since I thought about this project, mostly because I cringe a little bit at the memory. So much old anxiety. So many mistakes. So many egregious mistakes.

Topping the list: Querying before finishing. You might not have thought there were people out there with so little basic common sense, but yes, I was one of them. I was 18 and cocksure. I had zero doubts that I’d have the thing wrapped up within six months. Never mind that I’d never completed a project this long before, like, ever; never mind that I had only the vaguest idea where I was going with it past the first ten chapters or so. I was awesome and invincible. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I could actually get requests, for starters.

Ha. Hahahaha. Oh, past self. WHY WERE YOU SO FOOLISH.

Next big mistake: Staking my life on finishing it. I signed up for a writing course in 2002 or 2003, thinking this would kick my ass into soldiering through completing the manuscript. I was also, to be honest, looking for some relief from the terrifying imposter syndrome that was paralyzing me in grad school. Because this, at least, I knew I was good at. Right? So naturally my instructor’s canny criticism pitched me into full-on panic: for the first time I seriously doubted whether I could actually do this. And if I couldn’t, what the hell else would I do?

As if that wasn’t enough, another big mistake: Once I finally hauled myself through a complete draft – it took me until June of 2006 – I cracked open Writer’s Marketplace and fired off more queries. Revision? Screw that. I’d finished the goddamn story and I was closing the book on it, so to speak, come hell or high water. I did actually get a couple of requests for partials, but they fizzled, albeit in relatively encouraging rejections (one agent told me I was a good writer). I sent my last one in February of 2007 and, with a mix of relief and faint mortification, decided the market had spoken.

By now I can look back on the whole thing with a more clinical eye, overlooking (mostly) both the dogged devotion and the mortification I associated with the project for so long.

What I see: An assortment of spooky scenes I’m still proud of. A neat humanist creation theme. A world I still find compelling, despite its generic medieval trappings. A travelling troupe of actors from an oppressed minority group who were well and truly scooped by Patrick Rothfuss’s Edema Ruh in The Name of the Wind (and he did the concept so masterfully I couldn’t even be too dismayed). A weirdly middle-grade voice that clashes entirely with the darker elements of the story. A premise that is, in the words of that kind rejection, a bit too familiar.

All in all, I look at it now and see a flawed but not-so-terrible story that (a) taught me how to damn well finish something, i.e. how to apply butt-in-chair-despite-anxiety discipline to fiction, and (b) smacked some desperately needed caution/humility/realism into me. I’ve toyed with the idea of dusting it off and rewriting a “good parts” version, but I think it will probably just go on the scrap heap so I can recycle said good parts into a worthier project.

I would not wish you back again, first novel, but I learned a hell of a lot from you. Requiescat in pace.