Enjoying my Labor

When I was reading back through my book at the end of December, I noticed a flaw in my plan. This is the last major edit before sending it off professionally to someone who loves editing. I was inhibiting my progress because I was stopping to read my scenes! Keep in mind that I had just seen these the week before. But I was I was stopping to smile at characters and pushing myself to continue typing my edits as fast as I could so I could “find out what happened” in a chapter. Is there anyone else who does this?

Honestly, who knows what will happen with this book! This is my first time at the helm on “regular-sized” novels. One thing I do know is that I am extremely proud of my work. The effort that I put into this manuscript will never be done perfectly, and I’m sure that I will continue to find flaws that I am not pleased with. On the other hand, it is the best that I can produce right now and I am excited to see it start coming together!

This holiday has included lots of chatting with friends, loads of coffee, and hours and hours of writing! My mom even mentioned a couple days before I came back to my job (teaching), “You know this is your break, right? You don’t have to spend it all writing?” But the thing is, I enjoy revealing my stories on paper. I had two weeks of sleeping in and having lunch with friends I haven’t seen in several months. It was perfect weather most days to take a walk, and I visited with my cats who loved frolicking in the backyard. Then I would come back to the story. I wrote for several hours each day, just because I wanted to! I am now at the point where I am re-working things I’ve written and deciding if certain scenes need to stay or be deleted for good. I am sure there are more marks and deliberations to come, but for now, I’m enjoying the process.

I have the wonderful privilege of illustrating portions of my novel. This is not conventionally done in adult fiction, but I am attempting to make it a thing. I enjoy doodling images that I create in the story and designing visuals that accompany my story. It might be a bit much and I am not sure how it will go over in the long run, but it is a lot of fun to develop. This process gives me a different type of drawing to develop. Most of my drawings for this manuscript were done immediately after I wrote the second or third draft, probably around 2017. But now that I have a better sense of where the story goes and what I want to see in the drawings, I am going back and enhancing them, to be explained in detail later. As I challenge myself in my sketching, I hope that I can bring life into the story I have developed on the page, drawing my readers into an even deeper reality.