Kella's Blog

It took me just over two months to go through my 106K+ word manuscript and polish/revise it into second draft form.  It isn't done, of course; there will be a third draft after this one.  But... second draft is the point at which I have to force myself to share what I've written with a few special people... my first readers.  I thought about putting it off a bit longer, spending another week or two replacing a word here, finding a typo there, rewriting this sentence or that bit of dialogue.  But it was time, and fiddling around with it was only delaying the inevitable.  On the weekend, I took my manuscript to Kinko's and had six copies printed and bound.  And promptly found a couple of typos, but that's really beside the point.

I don't have many first readers.  I find it terrifyingly hard to show anyone my words.  It's bad enough submitting stuff, sending it off to strangers (so much so that I rarely actually submit anything anywhere... slightly bad for my writing career, mind you...), but infinitely worse sharing something I've written with friends.  This seems backward, but really, strangers are the faceless void.  I don't know them,...

I finished the first draft of my novel last Sunday night.  This is the project I started during NaNoWriMo in November, so it all happened in three and a half months, a compressed and intense and stressful and ecstatic experience.  I've been writing for a long time, but I'd never actually finished an entire novel before.  For me, anyway, it's a very surreal feeling.  Hard to put into words.

A friend of mine compared it to the feeling you get when you finish reading something.  Yes, it's like that, only more so.  A lot more so.  I felt a bit lost, and a bit sad because I'll never really be those people again, not in the same way.  Revision requires objectivity.

Even now, almost a week later, I keep turning toward my computer, thinking for half a second that I need to get into that head space, get working, get writing--and then I remember that it's done, it's over.

You know the sort of thing.  They phone around dinner time... "Good evening, ma'am, I'd like to ask you a few questions about matters of importance to Canadians..."  And I usually agree to do those sorts of surveys--I figure that if I don't, their results won't represent me, and might represent a whole lot of idiots.  Do my two cents matter?  Probably not, in the grand scheme of things, but if I don't bother, and a lot of sensible and educated people don't bother, while all the wingnuts and rabid types do take the survey, then what?  So...

"How long is this going to take?" I asked, and he told me twenty minutes.  Okay, I could deal with that.  "Sure," I said.

It started out in typical fashion, with questions such as "What issue do you feel is most important in Canada today?" and wanting me to select what I think should be the government's number one priority from a list of such random things as "preparing for a flu pandemic" and "Canada-US relations" and "reconstruction in Afghanistan".  The usual sort of survey, in other words; it struck me as slightly right-wing and focused on foreign affairs more than usual, but not creepy...

This year marked my fourth attempt at NaNoWriMo--for anyone who doesn't know, that's National Novel Writing Month, and you can find out more at www.nanowrimo.org --and in previous years, I never made it beyond 15K words.  Yes, the goal really is 50K words (the minimum length at which a "novella" technically becomes a "novel") during the month of November, and this year I completed it.

It sounds rather pathetic to call it "life-changing", but honestly... well, it was, for me.  Doesn't work that way for everyone, apparently.  Unfortunately.  But for me, having to commit to so many words every day (you need to average 1667 words a day to stay on target) helped me silence my inner critic and just let go.  It gave me a huge sense of power and ability, and I wrote more in the one month than I had, I think, in the past two years put together.  Not to mention that I got that wonderful feeling of flow or burn or whatever you like to call it, when magic is just racing out of your fingertips onto the screen, so wickedly often that the whole month was kind of one big rush.

What did I...