Coming Up for Air

I've been drowning in edits. Good edits. The kind that take a sloppy, nonsensical mess of a story and polish it up into something purty. The kind that remind you why its okay to write shitty first drafts, the kind that takes a million scattered bits of light and gives them focus, the kind that reminds you The Writer that this isn't just a creative process, it's a calculated, thinking process.

Somehow, to me at least, that's all very comforting.

I write shitty first drafts. My mantra, thanks to Cindy Pon, is "I am allowed to write utter poo." And I do. BOY do I. Some chapters are better than others - more fully formed, more character infused, more rational. Some are little more than fleshed out bullet points with a dab of description here and there, like spackle on a wall to cover up that hole where you ripped the plaster off trying to hang the framed Ricky Jay poster without a wall stud.

Or maybe that's just my house.

Back to the poo. The first draft of The Escape was very poo-y. Chapters 15 and 16 I could practically smell through my computer screen and I swear to God I had flies trying to land on my laptop while I was writing them. It was pooier than The Witch's Eye, I think, because of the historical setting. (By the way, dear readers, please remind me never to write a historical novel again, okay? Okay.) Therefore, by the transitive property of poo, the edits for the second draft have been rough. Tough. Painful sometimes. But they are progressing, and once in awhile, I can even see a little glimpse of the finish line, a glimmer in the distance of what this novel could be.

Now I just have to get there.