2DO Before I Die

Wrap-Up Post

It's been a good journey posting my experience wrestling with words on the 2Do blog. I thank everyone who read the blog for your time and comments--you were so helpful in providing bursts of inspiration at just the right times. I'm working on Draft 3 of the novel, and continue to learn exorbitant amounts about the authorly world while blindly stumbling through it. The book will probably need at least two more thorough revisions before I'm content enough to send it to a professional editor for surgical excisions. 

In the meantime, I'd like to bid this blogging project farewell with a large, bubbly toast to not expiring before you've tried those one or two (or ten?) things that make living worth it. Thanks again for your attention and encouragement!

Once Upon a Revision

I hit my goal! I revised my entire first draft, entered all my edits into my manuscript, and found that…found that…oh, let me make this a multiple choice answer:

a) Optimist’s view: this is a long learning process. Though the process feels slow and grueling, I am still moving forwards.

b) Pessimist’s view: This is taking forever. I am never going to finish this. What have I gotten myself into?

c) Existentialist’s view: It doesn’t matter one way or the other. As long as I am occupying my time on this swollen, water-filled planet, where ideas of worth are subject to the beholder, it will be worth it, should I decide that it is.

d) Eroticist’s view: This paper…so smooth…

As it turns out, I overestimated myself. I thought that I could do one good self-edit and have the novel ready for its first professional edit. In retrospect, that was a valiant but perfectly unrealistic assumption. The manuscript probably needs at least two more thorough edits before it’s ready for outside feedback.

I did learn a few things along the way:

-  When you edit, separate the novel into workable chunks (of several chapters at a time, for example). Editing one chapter at a time is too short. Editing the whole book in one sitting is impossible.

-  There’s something to be said for slashing the novel with a pen first, then entering the edits into the word  processor. It’s horribly time-consuming, but stops you from second-guessing your own edits, which is a very real possibility if you work directly on a soft copy of your manuscript.

-  Chances are, you’re a horrible, brilliant, and mediocre writer -- all in one. Forgive yourself for all three.

So, here goes another round of edits. I’m wisening up and following a template this time around. Putting head back into the laptop, and comforting self with knowledge that this process took the author of Catch 22 a whopping seven years...

The Medieval Stage

Middle child. Middle Ages. Middle of the road. These words all evoke images of being netted, caught between extremes, neither in a beginning nor an end. I'm in the early middle part of working on the book. It feels like the part of a long hike where the trail is flat, the trees are barren, you're miles from food, and your stomach starts rumbling hungrily.

It's no fun here, in this middle land of moving paragraphs around, deleting formerly sacred passages, and editting mispellled words. Orphaned plot twists and incomplete characters step out of the fog here and leave me scratching my head. I place them somewhere else, I complicate their personalities, but in the end, I just feel like I'm moving words around.

Another thing is happening simultaneously. The more time and thought that I put into my formerly lackadaisical writing experiment, the more invested I become. The risk factors become more daunting: an editor telling me it needs to be junked and rewritten. Denials by snarky agents. Another fourteen years of work (seriously -- it took Bill Carter fifteen years to get his first book published). The idea that a person can put years of work into something that just may never happen.

If there's one toastworthy thing about the Middle Novelican salt mines, it's that I'm not the only one. Novelist Holly Lisle says everything that I didn't in her marvelous online resource.

Cheers to another crunchy trudge on the long trail towards Draft 2!   

A new perspective...

After a whirlwind hand editing session on my manuscript, I’m learning the hard way – for is there any other way? – that hand editing is not difficult. Entering the edits into the computer is. The former involves gratifying pen strokes in various colors, the latter smacks of data entry. Now, in addition to toting the manuscript everywhere, I’m carrying my laptop, too, as a reminder that there are still 100 pages of edits that need to be entered. This is as grueling as the bowl of microwaved oats I ate this morning.

In a fit of fiery procrastination, I walked to downtown Boulder last night and had a long conversation with Tim. Tim’s a veteran, former chef, and cross-country traveler. He’s also a devout Christian with enough patient faith to fill a library of spiritual tomes. I first met him when I worked with the local homeless population last winter.  He’d needed a waterproof jacket. We happened to have the perfect fit in our van. When I saw him in the same waterproof jacket yesterday, sitting in the same cross-legged position on the red brick mall, I knew I had to talk to him.

Tim lives by a simple credo: pray, receive, give thanks. He’s a self-proclaimed praying machine. Strip off all the layers, he said, and that’s all you become. He’s asked God for barbeque chicken sandwiches from the Cheesecake Factory down the street, then been handed leftovers the same evening. He’s asked God for $100 bills, and received them from three different passerby. One evening, a group of college kids plugged in a waffle iron and gave him fresh waffles with syrup and butter. He hadn’t asked God for those, but who’s complaining?

Things like that happen to him all the time. His pockets are always full, and he isn’t wanting for anything. I sat there with him for a couple of hours, savoring our discussion. Mired down in tedious edits and a string of small misfortunes, I’d become angsty and forgotten about simple things. Food, shelter, water. Down comforters. Freshly picked apples. The fact that a man can be completely content, free, and fed simply through sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk and practicing his faith. 

I didn’t exactly run back home to input more of those edits, but I do have a new perspective. This thing (novel, life, set of motivations, what have you), cumbersome as it felt this week, is still in my power.

Edit. Receive. Give thanks.

I'm almost done editing the entire first draft! Envision confetti, lots of it, falling ethereally from the sky to the hot summer sidewalk!

And, err, I still don't know what the book's about.

Correction. I can't verbalize what it's about. Let me elaborate. I’ve been carrying the manuscript around everywhere: on the bus, to coffee shops, to the chiropractor's waiting room. It's acquired fetish status. Last week, I took it to my friends’ house as they canned peaches in their apartment (it's peach season in Colorado, and this is what we urban nature types tend to do on weekdays after work). I pulled out the manuscript and began marking it up with my sacred purple editing pen.

After he'd thrown a bunch of peeled peaches into a vat of miscellaneous sugar goo, my friend Andrew asked me what the pile of paper and pen was all about.
"A manuscript," I said.
He regarded it crookedly. "That’s all? Usually people have boxes full of papers."
I shrugged, pretending my skin wasn't a millimeter deep, and bristled inside. The manuscript is currently 175 double-sided pages. Double-sided pages! I wanted to tell him, but that would have shattered my guise of indifference.
He glanced at the papers again. "So what’s the book about?"
A simple question, but I could not come up with a cohesive answer. I hemmed and hawed and finally gave up trying to tell him. He responded predictably:
"You don't know what your book's about?" Well, yes, I do, but I just can't talk about it yet. It was as though talking about the book’s content would jinx the miracle of its creation. I felt as though I’d brought a toy assembly manual over to my friends' house and claimed it was an encyclopedia.

It took some concentration to step back from the ego bruise and realize that this must be precisely what differentiates a wannabe writer from a published writer. The more I read up on the subject, the more I see that as much as honest feedback hurts illusions, it’s the best thing out there in terms of improving the quality of the work itself. Andrew had simply reminded me of how much work I still had to do.

This is most definitely a case of needing to bend to avoid breaking.

The Purple Pen

I printed out a first draft manuscript for my book and have begun editing it. Bought a purple pen just for that purpose. I intend to polish the first three chapters so that I can start submitting them, along with an outline and a proposal and whatever else it is that agents require. Before I do that, I want to read over the entire manuscript once again and see where it stands in terms of readability.

The more I immerse myself in the process, the more I realize that there's an Everest of work ahead of me. The manuscript felt good to write, but on second glance, it needs a lot more work. People usually find good agents through connections, which means I need to set aside time to attend book conferences, network with local authors, and make friends in the business. I need to find impartial, honest editors. And I need to be tenacious as hell, otherwise I'll fall into the wannabe vat and potentially never motivate myself back out.

I've discovered a few valuable things as I continue researching how people get their novels published. The Good: quality counts. It sounds like a good novel will have a fighting chance of getting published, even if the author's otherwise unknown. The Bad: this might take years. If the manuscript gets rejected on its initial rounds through the agent mill, chances are that it will take at least two years until they look at it again. The Ugly: there are lots of shady agents out there. You can tell a shady agent by the fact that they request payment upfront rather than after the book actually sells.

Knowing all this, the only thing I can do is keep staring at the manuscript, marking it with the purple pen, and be patient.

This whole publishing business is a lot more emotional than I thought. Correction. This whole submission business is the hard part. I’ve cleaned up the first part of the book to the point of readability. I know what the next step is: have someone, or, better yet, a few people look over it and suggest edits/rewrites/cleanups. Now is the time to expose some of my writing to the open air. Yet I’m bane to let go of it. Like an overprotective mother, I want to hold my manuscript close to my chest forever, lest the strange and unpredictable forces of the big outside world inoculate it with harmful revisions.

So, it is with a touch of shame that I admit that I’ve literally been too scared to take the next step. I’ve stalled it with all kinds of boring activities. The car needed registering, I needed a super cute navy blue cruiser bike (really! I did!), and I needed to spend about an hour stirring my porridge on Monday morning, hypnotized by its steaming bubbles. Then Life itself intervened by spraining my foot, stealing my mountain bike, and giving me a bad haircut.

This combination of apathy and mishap did little to alleviate my fear of submission. The word alone – submission – feels like it goes against the grain of my very nature, which is based on a rather nebulous concept of freedom. To submit my work is to submit a piece of myself, pass it down a line of others’ eyes, and subject it to a conveyor belt of criticism.  I'm so proud of my rough little novel. To let it walk on its own two feet into a literary spanking machine makes my nerves rattle.

The process, in other words, is starting to get personal. It’s no longer about what I wrote. It’s about climbing over my own emotional hurdles around visibility, criticism, and even unexpected possibilities.

I’ll do it. I will. It’s just, well, scary.   

I. Am. Almost. There. (insert

I. Am. Almost. There.

(insert streams of brow sweat and ceaseless, dog-like panting)

I really want to throw a tantrum like a little kid, then have someone tuck me into bed and feed me chocolate chip cookies and milk. This is hard. I'm right at the cusp of having a workable first draft. That is, the characters are actually kind of developed and the holes in the plot are kind of fixed. It's not readable yet, unless you're a post-Modern type who likes spontaneously designed theme holes, but it's something.
And I'm proud of that.

Now for what people term the really, really hard part (got the glass of milk ready?) -- finding an agent. I googled "literary agent" and found the following in the initial result:

"Your literary agent is the book-marketing expert who can sell your crafted words to jaded publishing professionals."

Then, the article advises writers to heed "warnings regarding untrustworthy agents.*"

Screeeeech. That's the sound of me putting the brakes on the creative process. This site is saying that not only are books in general a hard sell, but agents have a shadowy side and cannot all be trusted. Makes me think of trying to buy a used car in a seedy roadside lot. I do hope the process isn't quite as stomach-curdling as negotiating over a late-70's Nissan with a sweaty, mustachioed professional talker. I hope that my book grows wings and flies like a winged brownie into the mouth of an agent who was just waiting for a bite of chocolate.

Wishful thinking, I know. But at this point in the game, when I'm exhausted from late nights on the novelist lam, I badly want a break. What at first sounded glamorous now feels like tilling soil on a hot summer's day.

Agents, O Agents, where art thou, Agents?

*quotes taken from here

I wonder whether writers and

I wonder whether writers and editors are a different breed. It's true that I'm just speaking from my own limited experience, but I really need a justification for hating editing. I hate editing. There, I said it. Give me a scene, a tragedy, or a love poem to write, and I'll happily dig away at the task for hours. Give me something to proofread or edit, and suddenly I'll have a raging headache. I don't know how it happens.

I'm approaching the point in the writing process where I need to get together something readable to send to agents. I first attempted this the other day by reading what I had chapter-by-chapter and listing the main points of each chapter into an outline. It was like a grammar school assignment. What's more, it didn't take long to peg all kinds of gaps and plot holes. My main character moved into a first floor apartment, but pages later lived on the second floor. That was pretty minor. When I realized that one of my main female characters had changed names in the middle of the book (I'd unwittingly written about two forms of the same person), I started to get worried.

My worry, ever shape-shifting, took the form of a petite, bespectacled man who looks suspiciously like an irritating old colleague. He began chirping criticisms from some dusty old desk in the back of my head. "Too many characters! Make it more readable! Nobody wants to read about minutia! Don't put the word "said" in the dialogue!" I must have opened the door for that guy the minute I decided to start editing.

Back to my theory on writers and editors being a different breed. Seriously, the two seem so divergent. The writer's the artist, while the editor's the craftsperson. But to get published, you have to be both. I can imagine what's next: the writer as salesperson, the writer as her own PR person, the writer as mistress of the art of persistence. The writer asking "when can I write again?"

I think this was the kind of project that was actually better to start blind. If I'd have read about all that was involved, I would have been cowed.

I have this theory that creative people are nothing but lime kilns who turn fuel (inspiration) into fire (their art). I use this theory as an excuse to do all kinds of random stuff in the name of inspiration. Last week, I was recruited to work in the ticket booth of a New Age-style festival in western Colorado. The timing was ideal: I'd just gotten laid off from my last job, and I needed some extra bucks. Besides, I can't say no to camping out and running around in costume.

The ticket booth ended up being a small, stifling trailer full of enough stress to ignite at least fifty sprigs of sage. The hippy set (and by hippy I mean those who spend their winters working on ranches, their summers traveling from festival to festival, and the rest of their time in a restful state intended to mimic a more natural state of humanity) likes to above all be diplomatic when distressed. This equates to a highly cultivated form of passive aggression where you feel good on the surface, but are seething underneath. This subtle anger is evidenced only by the rapid-fire chain smoking of American Eagle cigarettes.

Anyway. The point of all this is that I miscalculated. I thought that inspiration was the key component to novel writing, while discipline and perseverance were secondary. I thought that I could go to that hippy festival, get inspired, and mill out twenty pages of finely edited text as though my mind were a printing press. The problem is that my book has nothing to do with hippy festivals, and the only inspiration I gleaned from the whole experience is that selling tickets in a trailer in the 40 degree heat for eight hours a day sucks.

I believe that concentrating on one thing at a time is what the big dictionary people refer to as "focus." Back to that. 45 minutes a day, or three pages a day, will be my formula from now on. I'll leave the inspired bit to the poets, for now.