while the light lives yet

So on Thursday of this week (Bowman, for records, that was the 18th) I sent off my novel to a publisher. As I said in my last post, I began the novel on the 9th of May 2018. It didn't quite feel good from the start; I got a few thousand words out at the start, left it for ages, got a few more. It felt better than my other big project and less intimidating, more of a clean slate, so I decided to work on that when it got to the 2nd of January 2019 and I wanted to try again at a writing resolution.

The idea for it began when I was talking to Keats about the decimation of the first world war and I was being fanciful and I thought "hey, that must have been what it felt like when the black death hit. Those same apocalyptic feelings, the same complete sense of loss-of-future, the same "well, what now?" feeling. That was what I was thinking when I wrote it at first. An intense amount of queerness because - well, what now? why should we do what we've always done? It didn't shake out quite like that and that's for the better, I think. more alive, that way. I finished it in September of 2019, the first draft, and it was something like 64k and incomplete by A Margin, but it also had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and nothing I've ever written had an end before. Keats read it, I accidentally gave them a special interest and not-so-accidentally gave them a fine young gentleman to project onto.

The second draft took until the thirteenth of June, a whole eight months - almost as long as the first draft took, which, don't be too disappointed in me because I was on vacation for a solid two months of that, and at the end it had gained 20k and was solidly complete and coherent and better all over. Keats read it again, they told me what was wrong and out of place, they fixed my thees and thous (despite those being a natural part of my accent, I use them rarely enough that I get the subject/object mixed up. In my defence I pronounce them both th[ə].) And then. Then it took me five days to write a synopsis and a cover letter and I...just did it. I didn't avoid it or procrastinate I just...I wanted to have it done last week and I got it done and that was that, it was fine.

I've put a marker in my diary for when I need to think "okay, no reply, move on".

But holy hell, though. I sat and my whole brain was not-necessarily-positive exclamations the whole five days. I've never done any of this before! I've published poems but that wasn't really the same and like....I finished a novel. That's one. I edited it. That's two. And I sent it off??? that's three whole completely new completely wild things. Like I wanted to be here, and I wanted to be here before I was twenty, and then I kept thinking "oh I'll never get there before twenty five, there's no possible way" and hey, Bow? you've got a few months on that deadline. It's just wild because like...in the space of a week I reached it. In the space of a week I hit the thing I thought was impossibly impossibly distant. It's like a sudden vertigo, like thinking you're on the ground level and opening a door and finding yourself up a mountain.

 It's weird!! Writing is such an all-or-nothing thing and it's so weird getting to this point when i didn't super believe I would. I'm trying not to hope for a reply from this publisher because I know "the first one" is a lot to ask but. aaaa

So, a few days ago I reached the end of my Editing Goal Stage 1! I don't really have a lot to say here but basically I decided to tackle small edits first rather than the Bigger Stuff (adding scenes and finishing off ones I ran out of steam for) because I figured if I just ran straight into adding scenes, it'd feel like the same stage as Writing The First Draft and that might tire me out, so I went to the smaller edits first. Small bits of continuity, bits of dialogue I was unhappy with, making the emotional tone more coherent, that sort of thing. I did add Some scenes when they occured to me, and I noted down where I needed new ones, but largely I just did small stuff. I didn't do it as quickly as I hoped but I still ended up averaging out at four pages a day, which I'm okay with tbh. (I did fifteen pages the first day, which skewed my average and made me think I was gonna finish it in a month, which I Did Not (it took me three and a half)).

The stage I'm in right now is a really simple stage, just going through and fixing where I've written 'you' when I should have written 'thee". Thee/thou is A Part of my dialect but I use it really rarely and I keep running up against bits where I'm thinking too hard and can't quite tell Which (i know object/subject but I'm not very good at that either), but I'm halfway done and I'm sure my dear Keats in their infinite wonderful cleverness will be able to tell me what doesn't sound right.

So it's basically finish this stage, which won't take long touch wood, and then Scenes. Shit. Gods alive, folks. Tbh I think my absolute ideal would be to finish at about my birthday, which I did manage for the first draft, which would....if I started on let's say 1st of May....actually crunching the numbers of how much I think I'll have to add? might be doable. Maybe.