The Joy of Being Finished
Wow. That's all. Just wow.
Not an extravagantly articulate way to wax rhapsodic about how good it feels to be done, but there you have it.
I began Crass Casualty in December of 2013, just a few weeks after Dicing Time for Gladness went on the market. I had the benefit of knowing the entire story arc at that point, so with the boost of momentum provided by good sales and reviews of the first book, I finished it in 14 months.
That was 14 months of constant writing and re-writing. Novelists (and the spouses of novelists) know that I am not engaging in exaggeration by using the word "constant." When a manuscript is in progress, the writer is always writing. The body might be at a cocktail party, but the mind is composing and editing. That was 14 months consumed by obsessive research into strange and arcane little details, 14 months of seemingly endless revisions, followed by revisions to revisions.
But with each successive draft, the changes got smaller and smaller. Eventually I was playing around with subtle points of punctuation and trying to decide whether this pause warranted a sentence break or a paragraph break. Paragraph. No, sentence. No, paragraph.
Once you realize you are fiddling with tiny, nit-picky things (and especially when you realize you have made and then un-made the same minor alteration four successive times), you must embrace the fact that the time has come to abandon your tinkering, untie the dock lines and let it float out to sea. It's not perfect; it will never be perfect. But it's complete, and that's enough.
I have promised myself that I would take a break now. Hate's Profiting, book III in the series and the final installment in the Victoria da Vinci trilogy, has already been created as a Word file on my computer and is already about 20 pages long (mostly notes and ideas), but I'm not even going to open it until March 1st.
Really.
Not an extravagantly articulate way to wax rhapsodic about how good it feels to be done, but there you have it.
I began Crass Casualty in December of 2013, just a few weeks after Dicing Time for Gladness went on the market. I had the benefit of knowing the entire story arc at that point, so with the boost of momentum provided by good sales and reviews of the first book, I finished it in 14 months.
That was 14 months of constant writing and re-writing. Novelists (and the spouses of novelists) know that I am not engaging in exaggeration by using the word "constant." When a manuscript is in progress, the writer is always writing. The body might be at a cocktail party, but the mind is composing and editing. That was 14 months consumed by obsessive research into strange and arcane little details, 14 months of seemingly endless revisions, followed by revisions to revisions.
But with each successive draft, the changes got smaller and smaller. Eventually I was playing around with subtle points of punctuation and trying to decide whether this pause warranted a sentence break or a paragraph break. Paragraph. No, sentence. No, paragraph.
Once you realize you are fiddling with tiny, nit-picky things (and especially when you realize you have made and then un-made the same minor alteration four successive times), you must embrace the fact that the time has come to abandon your tinkering, untie the dock lines and let it float out to sea. It's not perfect; it will never be perfect. But it's complete, and that's enough.
I have promised myself that I would take a break now. Hate's Profiting, book III in the series and the final installment in the Victoria da Vinci trilogy, has already been created as a Word file on my computer and is already about 20 pages long (mostly notes and ideas), but I'm not even going to open it until March 1st.
Really.
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Upside-down, Inside-out, and Backwards
My blog about books, writing, and the creative process.
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