Welcome back to another edition of What I’m Working On. Mostly guaranteed to come out sometime in the first half of every month, I talk about what writing projects I’m doing, editing steps, behind-the-scenes business parts of said writing, and probably whine about something. You have been warned.
So last month we escaped without me whining about anything. Allow me to make up for that lack now. Thus far, November has been the month of shattered plans. My carefully plotted writing agenda was… destroyed? Obliterated? Shredded into confetti-sized pieces, doused in gasoline, and set on fire?
Okay, you get the idea.
It all revolves around getting the copy edit for Siren’s Song back. If you know anything about novel copy editing, you know that it primarily focuses on sentence-level grammar and style issues, and consistency throughout the novel, and so it shouldn’t really create a lot of new work for the author. I had planned to turn it around in a few days, working at a leisurely pace. But my copy editor, who may well be a saint, was kind enough to point out a couple of things that fall more under the scope of content editing.
I may have mentioned I wrote the first incarnation of this book a LONG time ago, and that it has changed significantly over the years as I poked and prodded at it. When I was getting it ready for publication, I was mostly cleaning up small things, but I was nervous about putting it out there. I loved the story, but I cringed every time I read the first half of the novel, even though I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. My editor hit in three bullet points everything that I hated about the book, and made a couple suggestions that I knew would fix everything
This is great, I told myself, you’ll have a much better book, I told myself. Though I was disappointed to have to break from my schedule of writing Valkyrie’s Call to spend more time on the first, I was also excited to FIX THINGS. I thought it would take me a day to fix the macro-level problems. And if I’d just made the teensy suggested fixes the editor mentioned, I probably could have done it in that time. But, as I said, this was a copy edit so the editor wasn’t going to suggest I rewrite half the book.
You guys. . . I rewrote half the book. Not even joking. We’re talking over 40K words and an absolutely godawful amount of smoothing transitions to get the chunks I was keeping to fit with the newly-written chunks. Those three bullet points had created a shining vision in my head of how the book could finally be exactly what I wanted, and I sank my teeth in and went for it. And I was so scared of being behind schedule—I was supposed to start the audio recording of it last Thursday—that I worked feverishly trying to get it done. I took time off my day job and worked on it fifteen hours a day five days in a row. No exaggeration. And I’m still not finished. Which, since it usually takes me three months to work a full length novel, shouldn’t surprise me, but I’d never felt more like a failure. First, for needing to do the rewrite at all, and then for not being able to magically make it happen overnight.
Which is, of course, ridiculous, but there you have my brain. Add in the usual other life stressors and I sank down into a funk where I became convinced the entire novel was trash that no one would ever want to read, only now I HAD to publish it because otherwise I was out a lot of money I couldn’t afford to not recoup.
Enter my best friend to the rescue. After bemoaning my fate and whining piteously about my need for validation she agreed to read the rewritten novel and has since told me she likes it. She is obviously biased in my favor but I choose to believe her because she probably wouldn’t lie to me. Friends don’t let friends publish bad books. Anyway, I love her and she will totally join the book’s acknowledgements page for sure.
All of this means I have written practically nothing on Valkyrie’s Call. It’s currently 15K words of mostly unattached scenes and I’m working my way back from thinking that this is the end of the world (yes, I’m dramatic about my self-imposed deadlines, I know). BUT, I can say I’ve finally finished fixing the macro-level issues on Siren’s Song, so now I just have to read through the rest of it to change small trickle down problems from the things I changed in the beginning. I’m glad I made the decision to rewrite it, but if there is any justice in the universe I’ll never do anything like it again.
My projected work outline is. . . tentative. Extremely tentative. The audiobook recording takes next priority and starts tomorrow, and once Siren’s Song is finished I can go back to what I want to be doing right now, which is getting Random and Valkyrie together. (Hang in there Random, I promise it’ll all be okay!). I’d wanted to do my self edit on the second Guardian book this year, but I don’t know if I can reasonably expect to fit that in. My editing brain and my writing brain are very different beasts, and I don’t like to edit at the same time I’m creating an entire new book, so we’ll see how it goes. I’ll let you know in December.
And that, more or less, is What I’m Working On.