At about 9.15 this morning I did a little Snoopy dance.
I do them most days, obviously, but this one had an extra bounce to it. I’d just received an email from myeditorthelovelyScott. It contained words like ‘warm’, ‘funny’, ‘very good book’. It transpired that he wasn’t talking about some bestseller he’d just read, but the 70+ thousand book-shaped words I’d sent him a couple of weeks ago. So a Snoopy dance was most definitely in order.
I’m ignoring, for the moment, the dread word ‘rewrite’. Baby steps.
But once the initial euphoria has worn off, there’s rejigging to be done, things to be tweaked and moved around, added and deleted. And that’s before Scott, in his words, gets ‘proper stuck in with a deep edit’.
For all that it’s exciting, this next stage is undoubtedly a bit daunting. While I reckon I’m at least halfway decent at wrangling a single sentence into shape, the grand architecture of a whole book is a different barrel of satsumas. And the whole process requires me to stand back from this work into which I’ve already poured so much energy, and assess it objectively and dispassionately, as if I were a reader into whose unwilling hands it has been forcibly thrust. Like most writers, my attempts to do this tend to lurch between two extremes: the ‘damn I’m goooood’ satisfaction of writing something absolutely scintillatingly brilliant, and the ‘Jesus this is hog-whimpering cack’ despair you get when you read the same passage two days later.
What I need to find is the happy medium, the ‘ok this is good, entertaining stuff, but it sags in the middle and that bit is self-indulgent and this bit needs to go here and be five hundred words shorter.’
I’ll get there. Baby steps.
In other news, we have the beginnings of an inkling of an idea for a cover design. Scott, generous chap that he is, has described it as ‘our idea’. But it was his. I told you he was lovely.