Erin Lodes

My last post was about revisions. (And if you’re wondering why I haven’t posted anything in a month, stay tuned for next week when I talk about my post-hamster wheel depressive funk.) I’d gotten twenty rejections so I went in and tried to troubleshoot a few things I thought might be an issue. And I felt good about it. Like, really good.

I wasn’t giving up, I was putting my nose back to the grindstone, I was killing my darlings. Everything I’m supposed to be doing as a writer trying to get published.

Right?

Eh. Kind of.

What happened as I went through my revisions—completely reworking the first chapter and subsequently trying to cut twelve.thousand.freaking.words from the rest of the manuscript—was that I found out my darlings are good. Like, my darlings are damn good. I managed to cut about four thousand words. But even most of those words were good.

It had been about three months since I read the thing, so I had a fair amount of distance and what I found was that I was glued to the page. They (whoever the hell they are) say you should write a book you want to read and let me tell you, I freaking loved reading my book.

The plot is solid, the characters are developed, the dialogue is realistic, the twists are good, the emotions are real fucking real. The writing itself is smooth, clean, varied, poetic, and punch-to-the-gut-ic. It’s good.

And at the same time as that realization filled me with hope and a by-fuck-I-will-get-this-published zeal, it also filled me with despair.

Because my book is good. And what if no one ever reads it?

It’s hard. It’s like, real hard. Because there’s only so much control you have of if your book gets published or not (I do know self-publishing exists—trust me if I hadn’t already the various family members and strangers popping out of the woodwork with well-meaning advice would have informed me—I’m talking about traditional publishing here).

But I’d gotten stuck on the hamster wheel. The one that keeps you stuck in the same place, revising and revising and revising something that might not need revisions at all, just because you desperately want someone to read it and love it and what if WHAT IF this particular opening sentence or closing paragraph or metaphor or line of dialogue will be what gets that very-busy agent to want to read more.

What if what if WHAT FREAKING IF. Over and over.

And eventually, with help from one of John’s very no-bullshit-allowed-here lectures, I got back on track. I revised the query letter. I revised the first chapter. Kept the rest at 110,000 words in all their glory.

And here we go. Submissions round 2 of ???

Keep writing everybody.

How I Published My Novel is going to be an ongoing blog series detailing how I get this freaking thing published. I know, I know, you could probably tell that from the title… I’ve gotten to this point (and am still getting help from) the amazing John Adamus, who is my writing coach.

If you haven’t already, check out Part One of How I Finished My Novel, and start from the beginning of this story.