How long is a piece of string?
I look at my manuscript, The Mediterranean Source, with a bit of uncertainty at the moment. A book that has been years in the making, and just recently, has had some pretty serious rewriting done on it. Admittedly, the rewriting has made it a lot stronger… but it needs more.
I have had some really awesome and solid feedback from three trusted sources on this book after the last major revision… and now that I look at that feedback – I just have no idea where to start. In early January when it was relatively quiet in the office since only about ten staff had returned to work after the Christmas break – I managed to map out some crucial changes that needed to happen to this book. And where on earth I put those notes – I have absolutely NO idea.
For the life of me, I cannot remember what on earth I wrote in those notes either. (Thank you very much Babybrain!) However… What I had mapped out initially was a damn good start to the next lot of revisions that I wanted to get done on this novel.
How many drafts has TMS gone through? I have no idea. Seriously.I think that a part of me wants this book to be perfect in every possible way before I release it out to the masses for their opinions. But in saying that – I am afraid that if I don’t perfect the damn thing, then no one will want to read it – publishers included.
So why do I keep throwing it back into draft and not releasing it out to the world? Essentially, I think it’s because with each passing day, week, month, and year – I learn to see more and more fault with it. I seem to be stuck in this vicious little cycle. I want this book to be perfect, so I will just keep rewriting, revising, and editing it.
I don’t want this manuscript to be another big piece of work that I have done only to be thrown back in the musty old literary drawer. I think that it deserves more than that! So much time and research went into writing the damn thing, that I just don’t think I can file it away for the rest of my life. Action thrillers are what I want to be known for as a writer.
So far I have quite a few complete and incomplete manuscripts that are all sitting in that dark drawer… Many that I seriously need to finish up, and start the edits on them. They are good ideas. They have great plots and little thrills. But they aren’t ready – and for some unknown reason, I seem to be mentally unready to start tackling the pile. A while back I printed all of them out and bound them together to start making my way through. Perhaps this will be one of the onerous tasks that I try and complete while I’m on maternity leave. To read each one and allocate it to the priority list.
You never know what sort of gold I might stumble upon. Who knows – with some of it – it may be cast aside forever, but the ideas could be recycled into new work.
Those are options that are definitely worth considering. In the meantime – I’m going to go back to the drawing board of The Mediterranean Source, and see what I can do with it, and where I should marking my thick red pen all over it. After this round, I’m not sure I can do this process all over again with this book… So I had better make it worth my while.
