September 2, 2009
Currently, I’m slaving away trying to revise a novel I wrote last year, and it’s been an eye-opening experience. I’ve been away from the book long enough that I’m finally seeing it with “fresh eyes,” with something that feels like perspective…but the perspective tells me the book is much worse than I thought when I wrote it. This jives with the resoundingly negative reactions the novel got at a workshop earlier this year, which surprised me at the time. But it makes me wonder: what caused the defective perspective that led me to write it in the first place? How do I keep it from happening again? And am I fixing this wreck of a novel, or are my revisions and rewrites just making it worse? After all, my perspective has been defective before. Or maybe I’m just overthinking this. That’s probably it. Overthinking, after all, is one of the things I’m best at. Ah, the torments of writing! It’s enough to land ya in the looney bin. No kidding! See you soon!
