Once again, having read the piece I'd been working on to my critique partner, I discovered gaps and holes that I had forgotten to fill with necessary substance. I have to keep track of so many things while working on my fantasy WIP that I inevitably lose sight of some of them - until I've written the whole scene out, read it aloud and spotted a mistake (i.e., my critique partner did - she's extremely sharp-eyed and awfully nitpicking; she has a knack for asking important questions that make me explore directions I wouldn't otherwise).
I've decided to go back to the beginning of the second part I'm working on at the moment (right now its word count stands at about 13K) and rewrite the whole thing. I also spent much of my time revising the original story, sending the first three chapters to the editor and hoping that she would contact me. I hope that she's OK, because she never answered back, but her silence gave me an impetus to do something I couldn't find enough courage to do for a long time: I'm taking "Almendra: A Fairy-Tale" off my publisher's website and other places where it could have been purchased. It's time to face the fact that it's just not good enough for publication (that not everything that we write is!) and I should never have published it in its current state in the first place.
At the moment I don't know if I should ever get back to it. I'm not going to say never, because it has a certain power over me that compels me to come back to it, but it has too many problems: plot holes, things appearing out of nowhere without any explanation whatsoever, inconsistencies, illogicalities... But, with all that, I still like it a lot and I had high hopes that someone else would like it too. Alas, no... It was the first "book" that I wrote (in fact, it's no more than a novella) and it's clear now that I didn't really know what I was doing while writing it, but I've learnt a lot since then and I hope that new "Almendra" will turn out just fine.
Question of the Week: Does the number of discarded drafts indicate how good or bad a writer is? What if I have a dozen discarded drafts of the same story and I'm still struggling with it? What does it say about me as a writer? That I'm bad at what I love doing, because I can't get it right, no matter how many times I try?
I've decided to go back to the beginning of the second part I'm working on at the moment (right now its word count stands at about 13K) and rewrite the whole thing. I also spent much of my time revising the original story, sending the first three chapters to the editor and hoping that she would contact me. I hope that she's OK, because she never answered back, but her silence gave me an impetus to do something I couldn't find enough courage to do for a long time: I'm taking "Almendra: A Fairy-Tale" off my publisher's website and other places where it could have been purchased. It's time to face the fact that it's just not good enough for publication (that not everything that we write is!) and I should never have published it in its current state in the first place.
At the moment I don't know if I should ever get back to it. I'm not going to say never, because it has a certain power over me that compels me to come back to it, but it has too many problems: plot holes, things appearing out of nowhere without any explanation whatsoever, inconsistencies, illogicalities... But, with all that, I still like it a lot and I had high hopes that someone else would like it too. Alas, no... It was the first "book" that I wrote (in fact, it's no more than a novella) and it's clear now that I didn't really know what I was doing while writing it, but I've learnt a lot since then and I hope that new "Almendra" will turn out just fine.
Question of the Week: Does the number of discarded drafts indicate how good or bad a writer is? What if I have a dozen discarded drafts of the same story and I'm still struggling with it? What does it say about me as a writer? That I'm bad at what I love doing, because I can't get it right, no matter how many times I try?
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