Don't Get Carried Away

I decided to go over my novel one last time before sending the full out to the agent, and ended up spending four days on it.

It's amazing what a couple of books of writing advice can do, especially Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. Don't get me wrong, it's a terrific book - but man, it's dangerous if you read it at the wrong time. Suddenly I was worrying about beats and proportions and italics (they tell you not to use too many italics. But some of my favorite genre writers use them, and so do I). I was worried about dialogue tags and interior monologues and adverbs and... the red alarm light went off when I was reading through my stuff and the words "this sucks!" came into my head. Danger. Danger. Step away from the manuscript.

So I fixed some punctuation, deleted three extraneous adverbs, and sent it.

The book was good enough to keep me interested through the two years it took me to write it, so I think I'll just have to go with that for now. The odds are it will get rejected, but the fact that anyone at all wanted to read the whole thing means I'm not wasting my time. If no one wants to publish it, I'll just write another one.

For now, I've given myself a week off to regroup and read. I've lined up a whole bunch of stuff that is not romance fiction to let my brain take a break and stretch a bit and think about other things. I started with Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - okay, so it's scary and depressing, but it's darn good. Now I'm starting in on some nonfiction.

Oh, and my long-suffering boyfriend will finally get some attention. I think he'll be happy to hear it.

Abby