Sheila Rambles

Is there such a thing as "submitter's remorse" when one sends out a manuscript? Heck, I haven't even sent it out for publication, just for an initial read by some friends of mine and now I'm thinking "Ack! What was I thinking? This is a self-indulgent mess!" Then again, I'm grappling with a slight case of depression, so that may just be the serotonin deprivation talking. I suppose I'll find out whenever I hear back from the folks I sent it to.

So I did one last read-through, transformed it into a PDF and sent it to a short list of people I trust. I feel like I just jumped off a cliff and have no idea what I'm going to land on.

Okay, remember that scene I'd retrieved from a previous draft and added back into the manuscript? I took it back out again. The perfect final ending I came up with didn't fully jibe with the scene before it and I realized that it needed to be excised for the thing to flow properly. I spent some time coming up with a better way to conclude the penultimate chapter and after a few tries I think I have something that works. I'm still in the process of reading the entire thing aloud to catch any missed fuck ups and to purge any awkward language. Once that's done, then it's time for conversion and handing it to my initial readers.

I think it's at a point where I can show it to people. Not quite ready to be published, but ready to be run past some People Who Are Not Me to get a feel for how it looks from other angles. I'm kind of elated and frightened at the same time. I think one more read-through and then I'll be dealing with formatting and converting the result into a PDF and figuring out who to send it to.

So I was at a networking meeting thingy this morning and somewhere in the middle of it I got clobbered over the head with a scene that I feel brings the novel to a proper conclusion. I rushed home to hash it out the moment I had a chance. I think it's a good sign that when I read the last lines I thought "Yeah. Yeah, that's it." There are a couple more scenes that I want to revamp, followed by one more going-over of the novel in total and then the next step will be rendering it into a PDF and finding people I can trust enough to show it to. I still don't think it's fully ready for publication but it is at a point where I can solicit feedback without whimpering in shame at the obvious flaws.

As I wrote in my excuse note, yesterday I didn't get any work done on the novel because I was sitting in a parking lot watching people trade stories for drinks. Yes, really. Once a year, the Starlight Drive-In (one of the last surviving drive-in theaters in the country) hosts an event called Rock n Roll Monster Bash, which features rock bands during the day and a double feature of monster movies when it gets dark. The Venn diagram of people who like rock music and people who like B-movies has a pretty significant overlap, so it draws quite the crowd. So what does this have to do with people telling stories for drinks? Officially, nothing, but my older brother has established a tradition whereby he brings his portable bar and offers people drinks in exchange for interesting stories about their lives. When people scratch their heads and say they don't have any interesting stories, my brother prompts them with the following suggestions--arrested, almost arrested, could have b...

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she spent most of the day in a parking lot, watching people trade stories for drinks.

So I added back an additional scene that I'd lopped off and grafted it to the ending. I'm still not 100% sure about it. But it seems to work better than where I'd originally left off and it was nice to retrieve some of those clever lines that I'd tossed away. (Thank goodness for saved drafts.) And now I'm already pondering ways to rewrite the returned lines into something a little more plausible than what I'd put down in the flurry of NaNo. I think I'll go do that now.

Just at the point when I think, oh, man, I'm so stuck, I'm never going to finish this thing, I wound up devoting all three of my morning pages to writing about it. It's a sort of ramble about something that happens 'offstage' and now I'll have to rewrite the scene it leads up to now that I know more about what happened beforehand. I sometimes wonder if there's going to be a word left standing of my original draft by the time I'm done with it.