Reading My Words

For a while now, most of my posts have been about reading and books. This one is, too, but what's different is that the book I just finished reading is my own novel.

I finally reached the stage of this endless revision when it was time to read the manuscript all at once and see how it is. I'm relieved to report that this novel is pretty decent. Some places need adjustment to line up with things I ended up changing later in the revision. There are scenes I want to shorten to get to the point faster. But mostly, the story reads smoothly, and many excellent moments or sentences I'd forgotten popped up as delightful surprises.

I left myself many comments during the readthrough that I now need to go through and resolve. While plenty of sentences are "awk" or "unclear", the good news is that hardly any left me wondering what parasites had taken over my brain. The most notable of these was a sentence starting "Ironically enough," where I had to leave the very disappointed comment "that is not ironic." Aside from that, I rarely cringed, which is a notable improvement over previous readings.

So now I'm getting back to work on cleaning up all these smaller issues. Once I have a tight, coherent draft, we'll see what happens next

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Kim Liao reflects for Literary Hub about rejections and creative failure: "Rejection still hurts. My skin is not as thick as I thought it was, and becoming accustomed to something is not the same thing as enjoying it. Also, not all rejections are created equally. Tallying every rejection as 1 out of 100 doesn't account for the fact that some rejections barely even register, while others feel like the sky is collapsing."