Once more with feeling

Back in the day – a day in January of last year, to be exact – I said I’d write a book by the end of the year.

On 29 November 2010, while sitting in a pub in Wincanton listening to folk band Lavington Bound and digesting a conversation I had just had with Terry Pratchett, the extreme magnitude of my failure hit me.

So I wrote a book in December.

It’s called The Sinless Sword. It’s a teenage/YA fantasy novel about a boy who goes searching for his destiny, finds it, runs the hell away from it but has his ass kicked by it anyway, because Destiny is a right old sod.

Well, I wrote most of it in December. The target was 80,000 words, of which 72,000 of book were writ along with 10,000 words of diary (I write to myself. Mostly as a method of keeping sane – and I’ll leave you to decide the success of that exercise). So that’s 80,000 words written, right?

There were also 40,000 words written earlier in the year and written off so badly by a friend that I stopped writing. For almost a fortnight. Yeah, precious, I know, hand me that violin and I’ll make your ears bleed.

A small digression: I backed myself into a corner a few weeks ago telling some writer friends that the critique ‘made me feel…[insert self-defeatist metaphor of your choice]’. They pulled me up with a sharp ‘hang on: who made you feel like that?’ A writer tripping myself up on my own words: for shame, I should know better.

Their point, of course, was that I had asked for an opinion, been given that opinion, and the decision of how to feel about it was mine and mine alone. The final prognosis was that I may not have the appropriate steel balls – being of the fairer sex notwithstanding – to be a writer. Not a writer who can actually be read by anyone, that is. But I’m not-a-writer with a 110,000 word first-draft novel with only small-asteroid shaped holes in it, so there.

Conversations about the quality of those words will begin to take place in about four months time because writing at an average of 3,000 words/day between the day jobs means throwing words at the page and hoping like hell they stick, while keeping a list of depressing length called ‘Review Notes’ for all the bits you don’t need anyone to tell you are bloody awful.

And I say ‘four months time,’ because I’m undertaking a 90 Day Novel Re-write program, which at one week into, I’m already about a month behind on. Ok, so maths isn’t my strong point, but that’s not as impossible as you might think. I’m so behind in fact that I’m writing this from Vue while waiting to see Tangled. Clearly, I have time to go to the movies.

So the first daily course email comes out last Tuesday and it’s called Once More With Feeling, which not only brings stirring associations of the Sash anthem Encore En Fois, but is more importantly also a Buffy reference, so this course and I are getting along already.

So with three months, two phone conferences a week and four class mates writing serious semi-autobiographical novels – in stark contrast to my teenage fantasy romp – I have to now re-write an average of 1,500 words a day – and researched, carefully chosen, ruthlessly trimmed and completely awesome words at that – to meet my new sodding deadline.

Deadlines are good. I like having brick walls at rush head-first at; you know the daily headaches you contend with while trying to reach the finish line will be nothing compared to the pain of crashing into the damn thing should you fail.

And I have a sinking certainty that this first rewrite will only be the beginning – as though the actual writing of the book were just a precursor to the endless main event of redrafting. LA Writers Lab could make a mint with The 90 Day Novel followed by the 90 Day Rewrite followed by the 90 day Re-Rewrite followed by the 90 Day Re-Re-Rewrite…

…I mean at this point in time, I have no idea how a novel actually gets finished. Polished To Awesomeness finished, that is, and that’s before you even get me started on publication. These matters are as opaque to me as relationships, another of the great mysteries of life. Seeing a novel on the bookshelf is to me like seeing a happy couple holding hands: deceptively natural and simple, but that nasty ungenerous streak in me enviously scowls and hopes that, as with icebergs, under that which is visible lurks a whole world of trouble.

Cos let me tell you, that’s certainly how polishing a novel feels to me right now.

Tags: Attica, Lien, Writing