Editing

I have this novel. I've been working on it for 6 years, give or take. The first version was a 300k word monstrosity that even I can't bear to look back on. But I was certain that it was going to make me millions. Indeed, I clearly remember telling a summer camp counselor at the time that I'd be a millionaire by the time I was 20. Oh dear, I'm 19 now, and riches sure as hell ain't running my way.

So, anyhow, I realized that this book was a. completely unpublishable because of the length and b. just bad. I decide that rewriting it would probably be my best bet. Of course, I'm an awful procrastinator, and I'd just started college, so anything could justifiably be put ahead of putting my story through the wringer. Consequently, it lay untouched for the better part of a year, probably. Around the spring of this year, I discovered that somewhere in the past 18 years, I've picked up a fast typing speed. So I decided to put it to good use, and put out another draft of my novel in a bit under a month. That one came to about 125k words, I believe. I was really psyched about it, and thought it was the best thing ever.

I gave it something of an edit and then decided it was time for Kate to find an agent. So off flew the queries. They were all email queries because it was over the summer and I was at home, and I didn't want my parents giving me funny looks when I asked them to buy envelopes and stamps and stuff (me not having a license). Checking back on the records I emailed out 9 queries and got back 5 form responses. The rest never replied, so I can make my own assumptions there. It was a bad query letter, it was remarkably 'form-like', in that I didn't do much to alter it between one agent and another, and the book wasn't ready in the first place. It had hardly been edited at all, and I admit that, freely.

In condensing down my 300k monster to something that stood a chance, I cut out a lot of characters and a lot of subplots. What was left was incredibly boring, and so I have come to the realization that I need a happy medium. This does not make ME terribly happy, but that's another story.

Of course, there's also the PREQUEL to this novel, that I've written and that I think is quite a bit more sellable than the original.

The goal is to edit this prequel of mine, a mortal god, in the spring and hopefully have it ready by the summer to get rejections. But at the rate I'm going (read - utterly untouched), it's going to be quite a bit longer.

Almost anything's more fun than looking back over your darling and realizing just how much fucking work it needs.