This novel writing business is not as easy as it would first appear. I'm currently about half-way through the current re-write. This is about the tenth re-write this novel has been through. Granted, they weren't all major revisions; some of them were simply exercises in spelling, grammar and punctuation, but still.... I'm really starting to get tired of this book. I want to get the thing published so I can finally get on to the next one, and the next and so on. Some wit once said that writing was easy - you just stare at a blank piece of paper until you begin to sweat blood. Gotta say that he was spot on. Except for the paper part that is - it's a blank screen today. It squats there in front of you, waiting for your ideas, a virgin snow-covered prairie just waiting for you to leave your footprints on its perfect surface. So off you trudge, making figure eights and snow angels, and then you show it to someone else and they say, "Not bad, but not my style."
Worst rejection letter I ever got, I was told that I was amateurish and derivative and should probably quit writing. Now there's encouragement for you. I quit writing for several years after that one. One day, I thought, the hell with him. I can do this. So off I went again, mussing up the field I'd already tromped around in, trying to make it look attractive to the gatekeepers of the publishing world. It's not an easy task. I'm cleaning it up now, removing redundancies, adding action sequences earlier in the story to get the plot moving along. And then there's my spelling! No matter how many times I go through this book, I still find spelling mistakes. What's that all about. I may publish an excerpt or two from the book from time to time, just to tease folks and to get some much needed feedback.
Fortunately for me, Michelle is very supportive in this process. She listens to my story ideas, reads my drafts, corrects my spelling and grammar, offers ideas about what I should do, where the story ought to go, etc, etc. And she keeps encouraging me to keep at it, which is probably the most important bit of support I can get. Without that, I never would have started writing the blasted thing again.Truthfully, I don't even know if I'm any good at this writing business. I can envision myself being like the guy who wrote Confederacy of Dunces, having this book that never gets published during your lifetime. Or maybe I'll end up going through a vanity press and have a box of unsellable novels sitting in my basement for the rest of my life. But this is a dream of mine and I just can't give it up. If I did that, if I walked away from the dream completely, I'd be admitting defeat, and I'd have to take my place amid all of the other "also rans" of the world. I'm just not ready to do that yet. So I'll get back to that tenth re-write now, if nobody minds.
Worst rejection letter I ever got, I was told that I was amateurish and derivative and should probably quit writing. Now there's encouragement for you. I quit writing for several years after that one. One day, I thought, the hell with him. I can do this. So off I went again, mussing up the field I'd already tromped around in, trying to make it look attractive to the gatekeepers of the publishing world. It's not an easy task. I'm cleaning it up now, removing redundancies, adding action sequences earlier in the story to get the plot moving along. And then there's my spelling! No matter how many times I go through this book, I still find spelling mistakes. What's that all about. I may publish an excerpt or two from the book from time to time, just to tease folks and to get some much needed feedback.
Fortunately for me, Michelle is very supportive in this process. She listens to my story ideas, reads my drafts, corrects my spelling and grammar, offers ideas about what I should do, where the story ought to go, etc, etc. And she keeps encouraging me to keep at it, which is probably the most important bit of support I can get. Without that, I never would have started writing the blasted thing again.Truthfully, I don't even know if I'm any good at this writing business. I can envision myself being like the guy who wrote Confederacy of Dunces, having this book that never gets published during your lifetime. Or maybe I'll end up going through a vanity press and have a box of unsellable novels sitting in my basement for the rest of my life. But this is a dream of mine and I just can't give it up. If I did that, if I walked away from the dream completely, I'd be admitting defeat, and I'd have to take my place amid all of the other "also rans" of the world. I'm just not ready to do that yet. So I'll get back to that tenth re-write now, if nobody minds.
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