After reading my horoscope at the coffee shop on Sunday, and blogging about how I needed to take a step back from the novel, guess what I did. I decided to work on an excerpt of the novel, because somehow in my brain, that seemed completely removed from the novel. I swear, sometimes, I can be really dense.
It’s the same damn thing. I mean literally – the same pages that were making me crazy in the novel, just fewer of them.
My justification was that I had planned on submitting some short pieces to journals, and one of the things I wanted to send out was an excerpt of the novel. It would seem that getting an excerpt published would be a nice thing to put in a cover letter to a potential agent, and I still think that’s true, but when I opened the file and looked at those words, those terribly familiar words, I actually thought I might throw up – right there in the coffee shop.
It was a first for me.
So I pulled up another short story, thinking I just had to look at something else, but by then I think I was having a minor panic attack, because I couldn’t even read the draft. It sucked, everything sucked. Everything I’ve ever written was a piece of shit and I should just give up.
Needless to say I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.
I went home and printed out a few copies of the sucky novel. I’ve given them to a few trusted readers and requested that they not hurry. I need to step away from it for a while. Seriously. I’m not working on the excerpt. I’m not editing the ending. Most of all, I will NOT re-read the first thirty pages, which have been so overworked at this point that they suck more than any other part.
Part of me thinks the past five year were just good practice, for my REAL first novel – the one I will write next. Just let this one go. Like a balloon in the wind.
I’m hoping that, with a little perspective from my readers, I’ll be able to face Tallulah Jones again. I know, somewhere deep down in my heart, that it’s worth saving, even if it actually ends up being my second novel.
I’m giving myself until my birthday (May 7th) to completely ignore it. I’m still writing every day, in my journal, toying with an idea for a story that has been slowly taking shape in my brain for years. I’m really excited about it, and just having that feeling, of loving a story idea, is reminding me why I write in the first place.
File under: writing is hard.
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