Monday afternoon, I leapt over the fence, so to speak. I typed my last words and closed the file on the fourth draft of my first novel, Bahamian Dream. Actually I consider it the first readable draft. For anyone who knows my dyslexic ways, it took a lot more than four tries for me to write in whole, intelligible sentences. After having Kinko's copy and bind six copies, I fedexed (can you imagine a company name being a verb?) five of them off to my readers in Illinois, Utah and Florida. I took the sixth into my shaking hands and delivered it personally to the doorstep of my neighbor. My stomach is still churning.
I've never opened myself up to criticism like this. My book has been a labor of love, right down to the headaches, backaches and unforgivable stomach cramps. I'm bracing for a deluge of negative comment because I told everyone to be brutally honest. It's like creating a torture chamber, then asking people to apply it to you, personally and often. Is it a page turner? What needs to be changed? What doesn't make sense? etc., etc. etc. With their feedback, I hope to put enough polish on the some 85,000 words to send a literary agent or publisher into blithering spasms of delight.
The waiting puts me in a strange place. There is literally nothing to do for a while. I keep busy researching the publishing business. I've signed up for the Nebraska Writer's Conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska - Lincoln (another garden spot) in June. I've even been so bold as to look for writing jobs on the Internet. The problem is that I don't want to put myself into a full time position, because, hold your breath, I'm going to start a second book and maybe a third. One is about a mother-daughter relationship and the other about a disastrous class reunion. I think I like writing, because there's a product at the end of the work -- a manuscript.
So far, my biggest problem with writing, is not the lack of income (although, I certainly could use some in this falling market), but with sitting all the time. The middle of my body has reached a crisis stage regarding its mid-drift flab content, even though my weight has been pretty steady since before I began this literary journey. I now understand why the middle of our bodies is called the mid-drift. Fat seems to drift to it, if left unattended. The answer I fear is a personal trainer, someone I pay to drag me out of the house and make me sweat, moan and groan to get my mid-drift undrifted.
1 comment:
Instead of a writer's conference, which tends to be a collection of dull writers who want to be academics and bureacrats, learn writing a better way: Contact any writer you know and ask for help and critiques. If you do that, you know their biases, they know yours. Anyone you know who writes for a living is someone worth reaching out to for help. On a one on one basis, writers are generally willing to help. In groups like writers conferences, they get catty and silly.
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