Bigger than I thought

I'm working on a big revision right now. It's for a big book. It's not like anything I've ever written. It's so much not like anything I've ever written that I keep putting it off. It scares me. 
What if I completely fail this really beautiful idea?
What if I'm just not as good as I've always thought I was and the real reason I normally write fluff is because I'm scared to learn that I'm not good enough to write anything else? If I don't try, I won't know, right?

These are the the thoughts plaguing me as I tackle this monster, and by monster I mean a three part story that MUST be a three part story, and each part is about 90K, so I can't just smoosh them all together into one really long book. 
And it's full of pain and jealousy and duty and family and revenge and forgiveness, and I never write like this, so I must be screwing this all up. 

I feel like a fool for hoping. I feel like an idiot for trying. And I'm completely convinced that I'm just falling flat on my face, and everyone can see it except me.

Someone very helpfully suggested I send it to a beta. 

I did. I sent it to beta readers in 2017. My betas loved it. They thought it was great, but in 2017, I could see where it needed something more. More depth, more character, more something. It's taken me 2 years to figure out what that something is, and I love it even more, but as I'm standing here trying to implement that SOMETHING, I'm terrified that I can't do it. I'm terrified that I'm just flinging words around in the hopes that something sticks to the wall. 

So that's me, scared that I'm destroying an idea I love and thinking I'll never write another story like this one. Which just means I'm a writer with the kinds of worries a writer has. 

This is an Insecure Writer's Support Group Post. You can visit the Ninja Captain here, and don't forget to say hi to this month's cohosts: Gwen Gardner, Doreen McGettigan, Tyrean Martinson, Chemist Ken, and Cathrina Constantine.

Edits, unexpectedly not as painful as previous encounters

I've noticed that people don't talk much about the editing process. When I was in academics, editing was absolutely the worst part of the process. People were mean and rude. Every comment was designed to question everything from your writing, to your methods, to your understanding of science in general. It wasn't pleasant.

Someone once called my work an "Unholy Conjugation." 

Yeah. That was constructive feedback. There were worse comments, more hurtful comments, and they went to live somewhere in my mind. So when I waited for my edit letter to arrive, it was more me waiting for the explosion to go off in my heart.

As much as I cared about my science, I care about my novel so much more. I didn't know if I could handle being ripped apart like that again. I expected editing to crack me open and pour out the broken little bits that were left of me. But when the letter came, I was pleasantly surprised. The suggestions: professional. The demeanor: helpful.

I was more than prepared to cry my eyeballs out (I'm a cryer, what can I say), but so far, it has only been things to make my manuscript stronger. I guess things have plenty of time to go straight to hell in a hand basket, but it's already so much better than all my other editing experiences.

In every profession there are parts that aren't the best part. The parts that everyone sort of scowls at, like how shoveling manure is part of owning horses. I was expecting to hate taking the feedback and turning it into something bigger, and that just isn't the case. It's great. I wish I had some more time, but hey, deadlines are something I do too. Also, I'm a writer. The more time a writer has, the more fiddling they're gonna do.


Right, and now it's back to work. And like I said, people don't talk about the editing process, so if you have questions, feel free to ask them in the comments. I'll respond by email if you have your account linked, and if not, response in the thread.

Ummm.... Post goes here?

Okay, so my posting has gone from intermittent straight to "Where's the beef?"

I really don't know if it's going to get better anytime soon. I'm currently packing my house, crossing my fingers and hoping for the best--oh, and revising my manuscript, because for real, packing my house up so I can sell it isn't even remotely stressful enough--so Editing!

I love how trouble and stress in life come in packs of three. It seems impossible, but really the whole world seems to move in threes.

Next time I'll have D*Con pics (how did I go another year without taking half as many pictures as I wanted?) and a report (hint: FUN!!!).

Back to the revision cave!

Patience

But first:

I’ve entered Weronika Janczuk’s contest for an autographed copy of MISERERE: AN AUTUMN TALE, Teresa Frohock’s debut dark fantasy. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/lL7kFw.

It looks like a great book, but as I haven’t read it yet, I don’t know. I’m definitely going to buy a copy if I don’t win this one.

And how fitting that my post on patience got interrupted. I think I can sum up my entire relationship with the virtue of patience in three words: I have none. 

Oh sure, I can wait my turn in the grocery store, and I never, ever hurry waiters, checkers, clerks or service people of any kind. That kind of patience I have in spades. No, I’m talking about the patience one needs in writing. That’s what I lack. 

I have these stories, and I so desperately want to tell them that I just can’t wait. I can’t wait to jump right in and get to the action of telling a story. I hate setting up the world, but I love the stories I get to tell there. I actually go through and read books where I think the author has patiently set up her(his) world to best execute a story. I read them as a constant reminder of what I should be doing, and I have the full knowledge that I’m not. I can’t wait to get to the good stuff in my story. I’ve gotten better over the years, and strangely, this is one of the areas where academics has really helped. It’s not enough. I want to get to the end of the book now. I’m inpatient. 

I’ve had another strike of lightning, a whole book has leapt into my head (Title, characters, everything, and I’ll put something down about this book when I start writing it), and I can’t wait to get started, except, here I am in the middle of telling another story. So I’m biding my time trying to be, you know, patient with myself. I’m trying to give my WIP the time and space it needs, because it’s a great big story with lots of fun and wonderful characters. I have to describe new places all the time because my scenes are happening all over the place, and I need a stage for my stories. Still, I have this other story that’s beating down the insides of my skull. Talk about tearing out my fingernails one by one, it’s complete torture. 

Then, because that wasn’t enough to tax my sad little abilities of waiting to getting around to telling my SNI, I changed the first chapter of my query bait. That means I have to go through the whole thing to make sure it’s consistent. So, the ‘free’ time that I usually use to write, and would be using to write this story that’s currently occupying my time, I’m reading through a manuscript I’ve nearly edited to death. 

So, all my writing is on hold while I make sure I have an internally consistent manuscript (it’s a really big deal in academics to have internally consistent models, so much so that I can’t bring myself to query without a read through to be 100% certain that I don’t have a blatant mistake in there now. It’s that important to catch the two references to the different first chapter). 

Before I can get to my shiny new idea, I have to finish off reading through my query bait, finish my first draft of my current project, then I can begin to think about putting my SNI to paper. I’m going to go bald with the anticipation to tell this story. 

Okay, probably not. I’ve managed to hold myself in check before, but this feeling like I can’t wait to start writing something is a good sign. A really good sign. 

“Patience, yeah, yeah, yeah, how long will that take?” –Tae Kwon Leap, the Frenetics

Getting back into things

On the eve of leaving for my evil scientist convention (Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, for those of you who want to know), I finished a major edit of my WIP. I decided that I'd give myself some time off, because conferences are sort of draining, kind of like walking from California to New York might take a while. How conferences go for me is, well, a mystery that I won't go into, but I will say that I got a total of six hours of sleep over a 72 hour period. Yeah, not pretty.
When I got back from the conference, I went to work on the dissertation, and because of that, the last chapter has been completely revised, and now I have to go through and redo all 39 figures (39?! what's wrong with me?), so that's taking up more than the usual amount of time.
Why do I talk about this stuff? Well, Newton was right, Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, while objects at rest are likely to remain at rest. In short, there is momentum in writing, and once broken, it's hard to build it back up again. I know that I need to give my brain a break from the work I just did, but now I'm sort of at a crossroads, what do I work on?
Do I do more editing, or do I plunge into first draft land? 
And no, for the record, the dissertation doesn't count.
Up next, by popular demand, mind: Crazy Dreams ("Was it that one where you're standing on a pyramid in sun god robs, while naked women through pickles at you? Why am I the only one who has that dream?"--Real Genius). And for the record, I don't take credit for my crazy dreams, but one of my novels (one that I'm thinking about redoing, but not for a long while), came from a dream.

Who knew?

I've done it. I'd give in to my baser desires and unleash the mad scientist evil laughter here--it really does sound like Daffy Duck--but I'm at an evil scientist convention.
I have, however, completed a round of edits on my WIP, and I'm astonished at myself. I've already edited this piece a number of times (four to be exact), but this is the first edit that really improved the prose. And that's what this one was, an edit to take out the bad words (See George Carlan's skits for more on bad words), passive verbs, and awkwardness in general. The amazing thing for me is that without changing any of the scenes, barely tweaking the flow of information, I found 10,000 extraneous, useless, and other wise redundant words (Yes, I am a card carrying member of the the Redundancy Department of Redundancy, why do you ask?).
Ten thousand. That's a whole ton of was/were/had/have/been/would/could/that. In fact, that was a full tenth of the novel. Okay, to be fair, I cut a lot of adjectives and adverbs to (how many times can I use beautiful? don't I have any other words?), but still, ten thousand words is a lot. Also on the chopping block was my personal favorite line from the book, but it had to go because it was actually out of character (and a little too mean).
So, one more read through for typos and flow, and I'm golden...


Right?

Editing

I would have thought that after all these years I might have bought a clue along the way. So there's this word that agents use in their blogs when referring to a novel worthy of sending out on query: Polished. Now at first I thought that the word polished meant that my chapters shouldn't have any major issues or typos (I'm dyslexic, I thought the typos would be the hardest part. Ha! Wrong again). Then I thought polished meant a rewrite followed by a single edit. And then, because it's hard to be that stupid that long, I realized that maybe they meant polished like what you do to rocks and metals to make them shiny. Shiny? Huh, a shiny manuscript? Oh yeah, I've got some work to do. So, being the kind of proactive I like to be, I'm not sending out any new queries until I'm confident that my shiny manuscript will start knocking off some socks (because stealing all the socks in the world is one of the steps to ruling the world!).
And I'm glad I've done it. My beta readers are all pleased with the changes I've made. It makes me wonder if I didn't start editing while I was still in the honeymoon phase. Now that I've made changes, I have to go hunting for that ever elusive typoe (seen here in it's natural habitat).  So it's back to the wild lands of editing for me. Now all I have to do is go over it another 200 times and I should have a shiny manuscript.

And to think, I used to worry that I might edit something to death (only one of many illusions shattered by actually trying to get an agent).