Some days you are the bug. And some days you are the windshield.
Yesterday was a windshield day. A good day.
I've been absent here because I was taking the very good notes my readers had given me on the chapters and edited them, and usually when I'm in that mode, I'm a hermit. I have a hard time communicating with anyone who isn't in the novel.
After making the changes, I wrote to the woman writer who'd encouraged me in the first place to do this story as a novel and had offered to show it to her agent, if she liked it. She read it yesterday and gave a very positive response. There were three teeny notes, (like I had a car red somewhere and green somewhere else), but nothing large. She said she'd think on it a while before giving me detailed notes (at which point my heart froze and I went straight into panic mode, freaking out, she must hate it and doesn't know how to tell me), but I slapped myself around a while, got over it, and then had a good day.
I'm not sure when she's going to send the detailed notes. Hopefully soon, because it's hard to move forward on the next chapters because my curositiy sits on one shoulder (hmmm, do you think that's the stuff that worked? or maybe that's something you're gonna get a note on?) and the bitch meanie self-editor in me sits on the other shoulder (that sucks, start over, who're you kidding). The nice thing about notes -- particularly this last round -- was that I got to see a lot of things that worked because everyone highlighted some of the same thing.
I could live on that for months. In the darkest moments of being a writer, I will live on notes like that which remind me that it is never as bad as my insecurity assumes.
I feel like I have a billion "important" things to post about here, and I haven't been able to sit down long enough in this forum and post. I want to talk about some of the political things that they're discussing over at 11D (see link on sidebar) (yes, I am that lazy). I also want to talk about loneliness and feeling lost and what I am watching happen around me with friends, which seems to be hitting so many people I love with such a terrible force, it's like a loneliness tornado. I want it to stop; it kills me to see the people I care about hurting so much.
Posted by toni at October 5, 2004 05:32 PM