Gary Inbinder's Blog - Posts Tagged "manuscript"

Manuscripts can be compared to bottles of wine. You shelve them and age them, “turning” occasionally to keep the wine from going bad. Sometimes they improve; sometimes they sour. Case in point: I’m currently working on the fourth revision of a novel I began five years ago. The story began as a Gothic Romance inspired by Jane Eyre and Rebecca. But I wanted more of the paranormal along the lines of The Turn of the Screw, which can be read two ways: as a traditional haunted house ghost story, or as a psychological thriller, a story told by an unreliable — possibly mad — narrator.

After much tinkering,or "turning," including a change of narrative from First Person Parallel to Third Person with a shifting point of view, I decided to go whole hog paranormal so that the supernatural elements, both good and evil, are neither the figment of a character’s imagination nor the result of mass hysteria. Will all this careful “aging” result in a prize-winning classic, a bottle of vinegar, or something in between? I’m afraid I don’t know, and won’t until it’s ready for “tasting.”