Worms Uncanned

On Monday, January the 8th, 2018, exactly seven years and ten months — that’s 2,857 days — after I started working on the story that would eventually expand into a three-book series (you can read about the origin of the idea HERE if you are interested), Hate’s Profiting, the third novel in the Victoria da Vinci trilogy, was released for sale to the public. That was seven days ago, but I am still in the midst of a long, slow, decompressing, uncoiling sigh of relief.

When I embarked on this project, I had no idea what I was getting into. Let’s do the numbers:

Book I (Dicing Time for Gladness) - 59,933 words.
Book II (Crass Casualty) - 62,697 words.
Book III (Hate’s Profiting) - 57,523 words.

Grand total for the trilogy: 180,153 words.

So if you divide the total number of words by the total amount of time from inception to release, you get 63 words per day. And there you have it: the most meaningless and irrelevant figure ever derived.

When I finished the final, final, final, final draft of the manuscript for book III and it was time to start thinking about the cover design, I realized it would be nice to create new covers for Dicing Time for Gladness (book I) and Crass Casualty (book II) as well, with some consistent unifying visual elements.

Well, as long as I was going to go back and fiddle with the covers (I reasoned), I may as well seize the opportunity to fix a few shortcomings in the text that had been bothering me. One writes a book, time goes by, and as one continues to read and write and just generally be alive, hopefully one’s style improves and matures. One gains confidence in one’s voice and trust in one’s reader. Lines that I used to find acceptable now sounded forced and clunky; descriptions that I used to think were vivid now felt overwrought.

I realized almost immediately that I was accidentally embarking on a major rewrite. But it was too late. I was already down the wormhole.

I am not alone in this dilemma. Late in 2017, Trish and I were having drinks with a journalist friend and her husband after one of her public appearances. We were talking about a non-fiction hardcover project she had finished a while ago. She confided to us the mortification she felt when she noticed a factually significant spelling error that had slipped past multiple copy editors — and she noticed it after the book was released. That’s one of the hazards of working to a publisher’s deadline.

So yes, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword having a looming business entity involved in your creative effort. On one hand, you do have extra resources — everything from research support to professional proofreading. But you’re also under pressure to rush things to completion, when maybe an additional year or two would have yielded a superior product. Some stories need time to ripen in the author’s mind, and age slowly over the span of many drafts, perhaps with long reflective intervals in between.

Ever read a book that was really good until the last ten pages or so, and then you got the impression that the writer either just got sick of it and gave up, or else was told by the publisher that there would be no further extensions to the deadline?

That’s one of several reasons why I’m glad to publish independently: I have the luxury of going back to make these tweaks and adjustments. I’m not stuck with years of regret over an awkwardly constructed sentence.

Also, it’s nice to have total, final, and absolute control over all aspects of the novel, from the fonts and layouts of the interior to the art design of the exterior. Having to argue and compromise over all those things with a publisher whose vision might differ seems exhausting and potentially heartbreaking.

So I go in to add a comma here, break up a run-on sentence there, delete an adverb, tidy up an expository passage, remove an extraneous detail. But every author is familiar with the cascade that comes next: you change one word, and that changes the meaning of the sentence. So you rework the sentence. But that changes the meaning of the paragraph, so you rework the paragraph. But that changes the flow of the chapter etc.

Ultimately, the changes were (comparatively) minor; there were just a lot of them, and the cumulative effect, I think (I hope), is a significant improvement.

Honestly, I was a little afraid to go back and re-read what I had started in 2010. But I was deeply gratified to discover that the story itself — the characters, the dialogue, the plot — still felt strong to me. I was not disappointed by the narrative decisions I had made in the beginning. That would have been deeply demoralizing. Instead, I walked away feeling validated.

Now that I’m done with this trilogy, I’m going to keep a promise to myself and to my long-suffering wife: I will not write any novels in 2018. (I swear!)

My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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