Post-machete, post-rewrite of scenes, post-restructuring, I may possibly have kneaded the flabby dough of my master-work into some kind of presentable product. The plot has changed, the tension ramped up, the prose decimated and a sting in the tail (tale?) injected into the ending.
I’ve printed the whole thing out, double-spaced, ready for the tooth-comb. All 346 pages of it. Now, after the craft comes the graft. By this time next week, my eyes will have fallen out of my head, completely wasted from poring over 85,000 words line-by-line to check each sentence for any and every fault. My voice will be gone from reading it aloud and even boring to death those spiders daring to emerge early from the crooks and nannies. Sorry, nooks and crannies.
I need to abandon the blue-sky of story arcs, narrative thrust and character development and get down to the dirty little word front. Whoever wrote, said, or even thought you can easily dash off a work of genius that publishers will trample each other to death for, hasn’t done it.
I fervently hope to be published but if I’ve learned anything since starting this blog in March, it’s that it truly is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.