Okay, maybe that’s getting a TAD ahead of myself, but still I am quite pleased at the work I’ve done over the past week and a bit.
As stated in one of the Conflux reports, Sunday morning was taken up with a meeting with my editor about book one of the trilogy. So on Wednesday, I opened up Love in Control for the first time since November last year. I was pleased that as I started to re-read it, I was enjoying it – always a good sign, I think. I’m also pleased that I was able to see both structural issues and sentence structure that I was able to tweak – nice to know that I can look at this objectively, as well as with love.
There were three things that needed to be changed or tweaked, one of which I identified myself and so I already had in mind what needed to be done. Another was quite easy, because I was sure the solution was to go back to an earlier version of that chapter (I think I got too clever, and in the end muddied the waters too much). The third one was something that I hadn’t thought of, but as I discussed it with my editor realised that not only did it give me extra ways to create tension, but I had already been alluding to this particular relationship not being all it seemed in the second book.
Ah, subconcious, you do know what you’re doing, even when you don’t tell me you’re doing it.
I did the work reasonably quickly, and then in the past couple of days have again gone over the book, slowly and carefully to make sure everything’s now clicking and to get rid of clunky language missed in past edits. So in a relatively stress-free manner, I’ve done what I need to do, and now hopefully the editor will agree with the changes.
Interestingly, on the second pass through, I felt my feelings towards the book changing. Not that I still wasn’t enjoying it, but for the first time I really felt that it was over. It’s done. Nothing’s pulling at me, screaming “Look at this, it isn’t right”. Nothing’s jumping up and down going “I’m dumb, I’m dumb”. In fact, my mind is already moving onto thinking about book two, which you’ll remember I was in the middle of re-writing when I had to stop to do this.
I’ve never experienced the sensation of feeling that my book is actually finished. I can’t decide if I like it or not.
I wish I could say the rest of my life has been going this well, but it hasn’t. Despite being super-organised about it a couple of weeks ago, I completely forgot about my car registration and have yet again let it lapse. And as for the state of the house… Thank god for domestic blindness.
Instead of such negativity, however, let me end this with the closest I’ve come to something steampunkish lately. I went to Floriade last weekend with Mum and Sister 2 and there was a travelling pipe organ, that played a wide variety of songs (it regaled us with Phantom of the Opera) via a pianola set-up. Oh, there was brass and cogs enough to satisfy any steampunk fiend. Behold, Australia Fair:
And the workings at the back (where, not surprisingly, is where most of the audience stand to listen, despite the nice front):
