MOBBED BY WHISPERS FROM ANOTHER WORLD, I have once again done the bidding of ghosts I may never meet. That is to say, I have made it through another edit of the Fiction Fantasy YA novel. You know, I hadn’t realized I’d stepped back for a solid 11 months since the last edit! But I’d been dreading it…thinking major surgery was still needed and feeling discouraged. Funny. It turned out to be almost entirely fine polishing. Pacing, order, continuity stuff, some remixing of certain lines, and lopping off a few sentences that pushed the point longer than needed. But not the big, ugly, box of wrenches under the hood fiasco I had been imagining. Not that I haven’t done enough of that so far. I’ve reworked this thing a lot since it began. I never wanted to give up on it. I always saw a good story in there.
So did my editor at the time (who also clued me into how much work needed to be done on it before it was any good as a whole). And so did at least one major film company who sent someone over to read my treatment of it in 2005 from the people that published my first book. The film people didn’t bite, but said plenty of encouraging things about the author. Still, I’ll admit: they knew their business by not picking it up at that point. The book wouldn’t reach fighting trim until more than ten years passed.
After I finished this last pass, I ended up feeling pretty lighthearted. I’m not even sure why I was feeling so discouraged last time. I think I was just tired. Trying to put together A NOVEL isn’t easy. I’ve come at it a few times, and there’s no way around it: you need to fall on your face a few times to begin feeling it out. Or at least, I did.
So, I think the front moves well, but the book really picks up good speed after the halfway mark. The pages start just flipping on their own. And for once, I think the so-called third act is strongest of all. [O! You! Most challenging of acts! Act that defeats Stephen King almost every time! I have you now!!] But I can’t be sure on my own.
My next step is two-fold. Work on at least a few key illustrations. One has to be a cover concept if not a fully finished cover. If I keep any old illos, it will be as concept illos I reference as I re-do them. Simultaneously, I need to hand it to an editor to get a removed view. Need to get a feel for how well it works as a first book in a series. Need to see if I started threads that didn’t pay off, and if I need to populate the story with some more on each one, or just yank them. Need to know if my characters are coming across the way I want them to.
Also: as a previously published author, should I get an agent to shop around my new book(s)? Or do I self-publish? This is the question that has been unanswered in my mind for the last handful of years. I don’t even really know what steps I need to take to figure out which is best. I guess I do. I’ll call an agent in town and have a talk with them. But then, that almost feels a step back. Maybe I should court one of the big publishing houses that once showed interest in my work? They could promote it far better. But you need a contact to get in those doors (don’t you?) and I’m not sure any names have survived the moves and years passing….
Secret Visions in the Valley of Night has changed so much since the early days, when it began with our lil protagonist trapped inside a robot. My eternal sympathies and great thanks to the three people who first read it—Dr. Timothy McKnight Russell at SUNY, Nick Tanis at NYU and Gail Greiner at my old publishing house—all dedicated soldiers who trudged through 300+ pages and ended up letting me know the first 70 were completely inessential! A true gift. They dropped many other gems on me, too. Gail was instrumental, early on, in opening my eyes to how to write girl characters more honestly. Their insights, and my own on what has bothered me and always excited me about the story, have helped me reshape the book to where it is now. The characters have grown more human (well, except the non-human characters) and complicated; a whole lot of drudge and purple filler has been cut clean, and the story has emerged clearly. And the truth is, the decade that has passed has shown me more of myself and others—valuable glimpses that have enriched the characters. Without a doubt.
In the writerly course of trying to flesh out your dreams and the stories that spin within you, it can get daunting. At times I’ve felt less the creator of my stories than a person haunted by them. How could I give up on them when they won’t leave me alone? And sometimes you wonder what all the effort is for. Am I kidding myself? you might ask.
After mentioning the old blogs the other day, I dug back to my saved html files and read, at random, an old entry from Sanctuarium. It was an entry I wrote shortly after a book signing for my first book, 12 years ago. I was fresh on the author scene, I was in NYC, and I was feeling vindicated for many years of effort that went uncelebrated (the usual destiny of all our years of effort). In my blog, I recounted some moments from a day I had completely forgotten about, since.
But I need to remember these things. Because sometimes part of that writerly path is feeling all alone in your imagining what might be one day.
Sometime, I’ll tell you the story of how I went from being the new, hot, sought-after illustrator/artist in Manhattan with multiple publishing houses looking to sign him and Brad Pitt’s production company’s scouts reading his treatments to…being here in green, green, Oregon, producing webinars, commercials, and political campaign ads for a living.
But not today! I have to finish writing that one, first.