My inbox is holding an edited manuscript. First time I’ve ever said that. My dear friend, despite having a new baby on top of a pukey toddler, has thrown me a big, fat, sucker pitch. Oh, she’s a great editor. She’s a sensitive and caring auditor. She’s encouraging. She’s had her chance at bat. She connected. In fact, one might say she knocked it out of the park. And now it appears it’s my ups. Time to put on the helmet and trot back to the plate.
I love what she has to say. And here’s what she has to say: Work harder.
I can do that. It’s easy for both of us, because she sees this effort the same way I do. It’s still in a formative stage. What, exactly, is it? I keep calling it “the book” but maybe it’s not a book at all. Maybe it’s a collection of stories, loosely woven together by a common thread. If that’s the case, I still need to work harder. But it’s a different kind of work. I need to get individual stories together and start sending those out. Once I start getting buzz from those, I can then put that success in my back pocket (and in my query letters) and start marketing a collection of stories. That’s a long game, that. That means we’re only in the first inning.
If it’s truly “a book,” well then, I’m going to need to take a step back into it and start working harder. We’re in the fourth or fifth inning and … we’re losing. It means more writing about … everything. More background about the place. More physical characteristics about the characters. More work on the narrative arc.
And I’m torn. I’m truly torn. It’s not even a question of long-term gains or short-term pains. It’s a question of how much of this I want to take back. How long I want to play.
OK. Time to get crafty. Time to dive back into the belly of the beast. Today, I start by reading the whole thing (again) as if I was reading a book. Today, I start again.
Not over. Again.