Reading the book…
Wow.
I just finished reading the draft of my novel like five minutes ago. I was prepared to know that there was a lot of work ahead of me, but I have to say i was rather impressed with how much I enjoyed the damned thing.
The stuff I thought was potentially awful in the third act actually worked for me.
Even most of my revision notes were just passages/anecdotes/phrases being repeated over again, but marking it just to see which reference was best suited to survive the axe.
That said, it was not like reading a book. While I did have enough perspective to read it and not entirely recognize it as my own, I can’t read it and compare it with any other book in existence. I don’t think there will ever be that level of detachment. It is far too mine for that to occur.
The only mistake I made in waiting to read this draft, which I found out when reading Stephen King’s On Writing, just to see how he reads a draft, is that he intentionally works on a small project in the time when he finishes a draft and reads it again. I took that, when I last read it, as King’s obsessive writing nature unable to not have a writing project, but I think it would have been good to have new characters in my mind, and a new story to tell, to further help purge this and give me distance.
I did write a small short story called The Cuddler a few weeks back, but nothing overly detailed, alhough I do still like that story, too. And I think I have a direction for the next novel that is actually, once again, not the next book I thought I would be writing. The new thinking is much bigger and ambitious. We’ll see what happens.
I guess I’m just a bit floored as to how much I enjoyed my own book. I expected to be pulling my hair out toward the end (just the gray ones) wondering if I could ever fix this in the next edit. But I am largely pleased with it, and look forward to getting some feedback on it, once I do a quick edit pass.
I am still way off kilter as to much of this book. People ask me how long it took to write it, and I never know whether to say six weeks or three years. The second draft is supposed to have a lot of revision, but this "first draft" is probably the third, at least. So, this whole project is doing its own thing.
Tomorrow, I will read through the "non-fiction" book, and then the merge will be rolled into the first edit of this draft.
But, the good news is, I can’t freaking wait to make this draft even better, and finally let some people read it!
