As expected, I’m getting hammered this week at work (most of which would have happened even if I’d worked more over the weekend), so the only “writing” I’ve been doing is re-reading Meet the Larssons on the train and marking up the manuscript as I go. I’m not doing heavy editing at this point — I’ve given up on that for now, I want to get the structure right before I do any more at that level of detail — but I’m making edits as I spot them. What is surprising me, now that I’m not looking to rewrite entire scenes as I got but just to outline new scenes and try to see where old scenes might fit, is that now that I’ve hit the second half of the draft, it isn’t entirely godawful. There are pages and pages of prose that aren’t all crap. There are plenty that are, but not all of them.
I mean, it probably is all crap, when measured against some artificial, commercial, “would people not related to you pay money to read this” kind of standard that editors and agents, with their “experience” and “real-world” understanding of the so-called “market,” would use. But I’m reading it and not totally repulsed, now that I’m allowing myself to enjoy it.
This is new. This is good.
The Unfocused Life 