Hey everyone,
I’ve started editing my third novel, the one I finished during NaNoWriMo last year. There’s always a chance you’re going to go back to something you wrote a while ago and wonder what the hell you were thinking, why you ever thought this was a good story, and what on earth motivated you to write this drivel in the first place.
Thankfully, that did not happen this time, with this book.
In fact, I found myself pleasantly surprised. I didn’t remember most of what I’d written and felt like I was reading another writer’s work. I kept thinking, this is good. I’d read this author again.
I’m not always so nice to myself, so I was grateful for this little moment of clarity about the book and its potential before I start editing and inevitably find myself hating every word. Now there’s something I can attach myself to, the knowledge that I objectively thought it was good when I came to it after a while, and that any negativity I experience during the editing process is just emotion. Emotion I can put aside for the moment.
So, two chapters and 6,000 words down. Only 74,000 more to go.
I have extra motivation to finish this book now and get it over to my mentor/editor for her opinion because novel #4 has clicked into place for me this month, and I’m ready to start writing it. But because I can’t work on more than one novel (and one world) at a time, I need to finish the one I’m editing first.
It surprises people sometimes that I’m ready to start writing my fourth novel when the first one hasn’t even sold. And I think of what I told the brilliant Joshua Pantalleresco when he interviewed me for his show Just Joshing earlier this year (check it out here):
“In my private moments I do sometimes have that feeling of will it ever happen, and this was the same for freelancing, now the same for books, I’ve been through this journey before where you’re just like nobody gets me, poor me, blah blah blah, but actually, what else am I going to do?… I am going to keep showing up because I will keep getting better but also this is how I want to spend my life. And you don’t get to decide whether I do that or not. *I* get to decide whether I do that or not. Whether you buy it or not is your choice. But you don’t decide whether I get to do what I want to do with my life.”
I want to write books, so I write books.
Whether or not someone reads my books, buys my books, recommends my books, is their choice.
Whether or not I write them is mine.
Cheers,
Natasha