When the Voices Won't Stop

Listening to: Chronic Future, "Shellshocked"

There. After a week of polishing and shining and finding typos, and sweating over this manuscript, it's off to the editor who requested it at the conference.

I made many changes, not any huge ones but several that fixed some minor problems people brought to my attention,* and quite a few that make me feel like this thing is as good as it's gonna get anytime soon.

All these changes required me to dive back into the book, and into my protagonist's head, with full force. I was concerned, at first, that I would find this difficult. HA! I'm so funny. Because I had the opposite problem. Once I got started, I couldn't get her voice out of my head. All week, she's been talking and talking, giving me bits of dialog and narration that weren't there before. Verbose little brat, my protagonist.

Every time I was in the car or the shower, there she was. I woke up this morning to her voice, as she gave me a few last bits to put into the manuscript before I sent it out. She just wouldn't shut up.

So now I have her voice in my head, and I figure I may as well use it. I think I'll get back to work on book two this weekend, since none of the projects I've tried to start in the past few months have really panned out. I've always been against starting a sequel when you don't know if the first one even has a chance--it seems like such a waste of time to me. But this book changed all that, because I really want to write more of this character's story.

And if nothing else, it'll distract me from the waiting game that has begun, yet again. Distractions--I need them.


*Thanks Tia!

From out of the darkness

I have returned. Sorry for my long absence, unless you enjoyed it, in which case...well, I don't blame you.

I've been dealing with some stress, and some vague melancholy and restlessness, and tinkering endlessly with the novel. I just haven't felt like blogging...haven't felt like I had much to say.

Bu I realized a few days ago that I must send this novel out soon. Query letter is ready, synopsis is ready, and I've almost finished going through my CPs comments and making any necessary changes. If I continue the tinkering, I'll be tinkering forever. At this point I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (in the "doing something useless" fashion, not the "this ship is sinking" way).

What's odd is that I've never been like this with a novel. The last two, I went through two edits and a few CPs comments, then felt like there was nothing I could do. With this one...well, the perfectionist in me is really making her thoughts known. She's a loud one, the perfectionist. Strident, bossy, shrill.

But the other night I shut her up. "I'm going to do this, and this, and this--and then I'm sending it out. And you can just shut up about it." She had a lot to say about that, but I shut down her protestations. Changing the word order in this sentence and double-checking my comma placement aren't going to make a huge difference, and are really just more ways to procrastinate.

So! A week from this Monday, barring any other commitments (might need to be helping clean out my mom's house before the sale), the first batch of queries goes out.

There. I said it, and now I'm committed.

Of course, once I send those queries out, I'll probably be fit to be committed in another way. But we'll worry about that rubber room when we get to it.