One of the things that keeps me writing is chasing a particular feeling. The one you get when you watch or read something enthralling, where you’re carried away by the action and music and drama. I want to write something that makes me feel like that, I would think to myself, inside the theatre, or in the dark wee hours, still reading long after bedtime. I don’t want to write a movie, or even anything styled like a movie. Just something that gives me the same rising thrill, the same tightness in my chest.
I forgot, until recently, how I felt writing Fletcher & Cooper. How day after day, the words would pour out like a burst main, the adventure carrying me along.
I finished, and the pandemic happened1. I started editing during one of the earlier lockdowns–I got the first half to a place where I could hand it off to beta readers–but by that point, everyone who had been excited to read it before… wasn’t. (Most disappointingly of all, the person I wrote it for told me they didn’t care for it. Was it because of the story or because of the world? Does it matter?) Depression took care of the rest. Into a drawer F&C went. There were a few half-hearted stabs to edit Part Two, but it’s in far rougher shape than Part One, and not as linear, and somewhere along the way I convinced myself that I had to level-up my editing before I could tackle it.
And so the years went.
My launch is in less than a month. Curve will be out in the world, officially. There will be no more work to do on it. It will be gone.
What do I do next?
The obvious answer, the one I kept coming back to, was “start a new novel”. But each time I tried, there was a tug at the back of my mind. Fletcher & Cooper. My baby. The novel I poured so much of myself into. The one where I did only things that I enjoyed, for me. Never mind tropes or trends or “what sells”; F&C was a smoothie of only ingredients I love. (Maybe that’s why it didn’t hit the same way for other people as my previous novels; where I see a delicious concotion, other people saw swamp water.)
But I couldn’t work on it until I levelled up my editing. Right? And to do that I need to read books and take courses and practice on other things, and, and, and…
…right?
Or is that procrastination talking? Cloaking, perhaps, the fear of rejection (again)? The depressing knowledge of the long slog it will be (again)?
What if I can edit it, at least to get it to a point where a beta reader can look over it? Like, I already have the ability? What if… I just have to… sit at the computer, and do it?
Can I?
Turns out, yes, I can.
Actually sitting down and opening the manuscript took a lot of willpower but oh, the relief. The weight of having the untouched MS looming–gone. I was almost giddy as the dread dissolved. That’s not to say I’m optimistic about how the work will go; I can already tell it’ll be slow-going.2 Terry Prachett once said that a first draft is you, the writer, telling yourself the story. And that’s very evident with Part Two of F&C. I apparently had no idea where I was going with anything. There are meanders and abrupt left-turns, even within a single scene. So it takes a while to read-over, and figure out what I was trying to convey, and whittling out the rest.
I started with 297 pages3. Including previous stabs at editing, and my work over the past week, and I’m at *checks notes* still 274 to go. Sloooow. At least I’m no longer dreading opening the MS.
So yeah. A lot of work to do. But oh my god–that feeling? The one I’ve been chasing all my life? It’s there, in the story. I’ve forgotten much of what happens in Part Two, and part of why it’s going so slowly is that I am reading ahead, and forgetting to edit.
I want to see what happens next.
Today to help me focus on the right tone while I was stuck in a particularly dense scene, I dug up the old playlist I wrote to, and flittered through the tracks. Hit me right in the feels. I had a moment listening to one while I was “editing” (reading) where I had to stop, because my eyes were tearing up. Not from the song itself, or the manuscript–I was in the middle of cutting down an exposition thicket–but because I caught a glimpse of it. The feeling.
I wrote this. I did this.
Maybe… no one else will ever feel the same way about F&C. Maybe no one will enjoy it as much (or at all). Maybe (likely) it’ll never sell.
But maybe… that’s okay? Maybe the joy of it can just be for me?
I don’t have to decide how I feel about it, yet. There’s 274 pages between now and then.
I’m looking forward to them.
- I am fairly certain those two events are not related. ↩︎
- The wheels of my editing rube-goldberg-machine turn incrementally, and that’s without trying to figure out how I had Scrivener set up before. Scrivener is super powerful but thus also terrifically complicated, and thus I resist using it until the end. ↩︎
- in InDesign, which is where I do my editing (see footnote #2). It’s probably about half that, in Word pages. ↩︎
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