Hey, it’s the thirteenth post in Writing Life! Here’s a black cat for you…
And here’s a ladder…
And last but not least, here’s a black cat…walking under a ladder!
All right! That ought to take care of plenty of bad luck for us all. Let’s move on.
So, what’s going on in the Writing Life this week? Well, lemme tell ya…
I have officially shipped off the first draft of the first book of I Hunt Killers to a couple of my beta readers. The rest of them aren’t quite ready for it yet, so I’m not deluging them with paper until they give the go-sign. But in the meantime, I get that wonderful, stomach-churning feeling of knowing that People Are Reading My Words. Will they love Killers? Hate it? Worse yet, will they just shrug their shoulders and say, “Meh?”
This can be a tough time for me; Tom Petty was a wise, wise man when he said, “The waiting is the hardest part.” It’s not that I feel that if my betas don’t like the draft that it reflects poorly on me — hey, it’s an early draft, right? It’s more that my whoel reason for writing is so that other people will read — and enjoy reading — my work. If my betas don’t enjoy what I give them, then I feel bad. I mean, it’s great that I get some feedback and can think about my next step (Revise? Rewrite? Or maybe the betas are just wrong…) but in the meantime, there are some folks who read my work and didn’t have fun. Boo.
Fortunately, one of the benefits to writing a million books at once is that there’s always work to do, so I don’t have much time to stress about that! Right now, I’m getting back into The Book That Will Kill Me. I read the first hundred or so pages yesterday and was pleased with them. No mean trick when you realize I wrote those words more than a year ago and haven’t looked at them since. I was surprised at how well they seemed to integrate with what I wrote a month or so ago at the end of the book. So, that’s a bit of good news. I’ll be reading through the entire manuscript over the next week or so, making corrections and adding in bits and pieces that are missing. The whole thing clocked in at 803 pages when I printed it, and I don’t think it’s going to get any shorter. In fact, it may even get a little longer. (Sorry, future editor!)
If you’re curious, here’s what an 803-page manuscript looks like:
I’ve conveniently provided a ruler for scale. (The little stack of 20 or so pages next to the main stack is a set of notes for me to consult while working my way through the manuscript.)
So, between waiting for Killers feedback and working on The Monster (and, of course, noodling around with art for the graphic novel as Colleen sends it), I’m pretty busy right now. I guess I better get back to work…
See you next week!