A Week of Frantic Writing/Editing

I’m feeling more like a REAL writer every day…

I just spent the last ten days going over FINDING CADENCE to get it into some sort of shape to send to world-famous, Alan Rinzler, editor to stars of the literary world. You know the ones: Tom Robbins, Toni Morrison, Clive Cussler – those kinds of literary luminaries.

I won Mr. Rinzler’s expert services during an eBay silent auction held by the San Francisco Writers Conference.

For those of you who have been following my search for Cadence (or not – who knows? you might have landed on this blog by pure coincidence), FINDING CADENCE was my first novel. Epic. 175K pages. Poorly written. I took every cliqueed broken rule and broke it some more. It was so awful, I couldn’t stand to look at it for more than 365 days. It was barely readable by me, so I wonder what my betas thought.

But…the story is a good one. It was salvageable. So with some trepidation, I opened the file back up last summer and plunged into the muck. I added more drama, more angst, more problems. I planned the story out better, making sure to weave in details I missed the first time. I cut, cut, and cut – especially the redundancies, the adverbs, and most of the telling. Then I cut some more.

Next I entered it into the SFWC contest. And it made it to finalist. Finalist!

Then I bid on Alan Rinzler’s editing, and I won the auction. I won!

Oh, my God. I won?

This is where the last ten days come into play. I was in the midst of changing the manuscript from third person, many POVs (too many if you ask me – my head was spinning) to first person. I had only completed a little more than one-third of the story at the time of the conference. So when I returned home, I spent every spare minute going over the rest of it.

I finished Wednesday night, and emailed the revised Cadence to Mr. Rinzler yesterday. It’s leaner (100K), meaner, but still needs a lot of work. Believe me, if anyone needs writing help, it’s me.

I need to add entire scenes I cut from those other POVs. Otherwise the story will be disjointed, as I used those other people to fill in the gaps of the story.

But my first plan of action was to deliver something to Mr. Rinzler. And I have.

It’s on to working on other things I’ve let slide. Laziness, other life, bad mojo…I can blame my lack of writing on lots of things, but it all comes down to me. I figure the rush I got from the conference won’t last long, so I might as well take advantage of it while I can.