Alrighty, world, it’s time to get serious. January has come. I have three-ish months until April arrives, and I can already feel it sneaking up on me with a tranquilizer gun. April is my deadline month. By April 1st my manuscript will have been completely revised and ready to present to literary agents, if my query letter makes them jump out of their chairs shouting “This is it! This is the one! The one manuscript to rule them all! My preciouuuuusssss.” Or something like that.
Sometime this month I will hand my manuscript to a professional editor who will hopefully give me some expert feedback. I don’t care if she dips it in a bottle of red ink and sends every page through a paper shredder. As long as my novel turns out better than it is right now, she can tell me it’s a piece of questionable material that belongs in an outhouse overrun with icky spiders.
As of right now, in this very moment, even as I write this overly dramatic blog post, I am halfway through revising draft 5 of Byrd of Paradise. And I’m trying to enjoy every minute of it.
Revising can be…is “painful” the right word? I think it is. Revising can be excruciating. I mean, I’m basically cutting out the fleshy parts and trying to salvage an arm here, an eyeball there—parts that I can stitch together to create life, beating, breathing, fighting life. Revising is hard. And there’s always the risk of failure. What if the heart doesn’t start, doesn’t go thump-thump? What if the brain I dug up is just a turnip, a regular old vegetable? Throughout the revising process I hope—I pray—for that crash of lighting to make my writing come alive.
It’s bound to rain sometime. That’s what keeps my hope alive. And that might be enough to make my manuscript come alive too.
Stay tuned. I’ll be posting updates on my progress, sharing tidbits I learn, random thoughts I have, and perhaps a teaser or two. I might even do a “Live Blog” showing me revising in real time. Oh, won’t that be fun! And maybe a bit frightening…
In the meantime, here’s a picture of an angora bunny, for no reason at all except that these things make me laugh hysterically. It’s so fuzzy!
Did I say “picture”? I meant “pictures” with an “s.”
It’s pretty sad that they make sweaters out of these guys. I’d rather just laugh at them. And maybe cuddle them.
It is common knowledge that by the time they are full grown, angora bunnies develop complete blindness, not because of retinal degradation, but because their fur grows so long and so thick that they cannot see past it. This fact is illustrated in the photograph below:
I’m excited for you to reach your deadline!!!! Also, those bunnies are HILARIOUS!
Aren’t they! And thank you. I am pretty excited myself!