"Most good writers have a tome or three under the bed before they get an agent interested. They might be standalones, they might be parts of a series; what they universally are is pretty terrible." Says Miss Snark. This is deeply disheartening to somebody who's working on the absolutely final revision of her first novel (well, really my second, but the first doesn't count for reasons I won't divulge). Part of me thinks "but don't those honorable mentions for the story I pulled from it mean anything?" The obvious reply to that is, well, yeah. They mean you wrote a good short story, and I realize that, sadly, Miss Snark is probably right.
So why bother to keep revising this thing, then? Because it's a learning experience, which is in part the point. Writers learn by doing (not, I might add, by having a group of somebody elses tell them how to do it, either), so whipping this thing into shape will be a good exercise in long revision, in more ways than one. With this kind of distance from the book, it can only improve it. By now, I'm a different kind of person and a different kind of writer, and a lot of words have passed under the bridge since I "finished" this book originally, in (gasp!) 1994. Shocking how long that is. And shocking how long it's taking me to do the revisions. I've already decided that once they're done, it's time to move on to the next book, whatever it is. I'm not sure if I'm going to go back to The Gates, now that I've got some more short story writing experience under my belt, or if I'm going to back burner that and go on to the virtual city cyberpunk book. Either way, while Prospero's Daughter is making the rounds, it's on to a new book.
And if there are no nibbles on PD? Under the bed with it.
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