Death by a Thousand Cuts... and Re-writes

First, let me say "AAAAAAAAACK!!!!!!" just once.

Phew.  Thanks for that.  Now I'll get to the point.

Something cool happened to me.  I'll post on that later.  For now, let's stick to the horrible part, as that's what I'm presently feeling.

I sent my book off to the agent.  Pretty cool, huh?  I went through a brutal editing by my fiancé, talented writer and brutal editor Ruth Akien, which involved basically realising what I'd done was a bunch of overly introspective waffle, and I had to re-evaluate my book and have a long think about how I need to go about plotting a novel.

(Every writer, I believe, has their own process for figuring out their book as a whole.  I have now discovered mine and I'll gladly share it with you, but not in this post.  If I did that, the post would become unfocussed waffle.  See what I did there?)

So, a few long months later, I finished the re-write.  I'm happy with it.  Like, I actually feel confident that it's my best work.  I didn't rush or cut corners.  I figured it, and myself, out to no small extent and I feel like a real writer for the first time in my life.  So off the story went to the agent.

After doing that, if you have a really good agent, apparently there can be a bit of a waiting game.  This I didn't expect.  Whenever I email Leslie, even if it's 2AM, she gets back to me like 10 minutes later.  (I don't know how the hell she does that.)  This time, she took a few weeks.  That's because she wanted to give the book a long think, and she had lots of other work to do with other authors.  That's good, right?  She has other authors in her list of clients and she works hard and frequently for them.  Sounds like my kind of agent.

So then I waited.  I decided to take some well-deserved time off.  I went to video game land, book land, relationship land... all that crap.  But it turns out I'm a work-o-holic.  I started writing a new book, plotted the first third and figured out how I want it to end, and got to work.  Things were going great.

Then I got my manuscript notes back from Leslie.  Great!  I was told I had "great elements".  ... ...

...

Okay.  So what the hell did that mean?  It could be that the story's great, and just needs a tweak, or that the story sucks, but something with similar characters might work!  Should I be elated or should I tear my hair out?  I had no idea how to take it.

It turned out, she thought the book needed a new beginning.  So I had to drop my previous project and get stuck back into Paint the Raven Black.

One thing I've learned is that writing a novel is an emotional rollercoaster.  Sometimes I love it.  Sometimes I hate it.  Right now I hate it.  I want to set my computer on fire, run screaming and laughing into the night, and get a job working at McDonald's or something.  Or maybe I just wanted to write a blog post.  McDonald's pays better, but this is probably more cathartic.

Well, back to work.