As Good As I Can Get It
Today I finished the last revisions on the second draft of le livre. The final three chapters were particularly hard to do, since I had never really felt that I got the climax and denouement just right in the story. But I feel really good about them today, and so happy to have reached a place of feeling like, once these edits are inputed (I worked on hard copy during this round of revisions), I can actually start querying agents.
I started writing this manuscript in the fall of 2007, when I was still living in DC. Even though I was a professional writer in my day job, I needed something more and le livre was a welcome release from the very dull writing I was doing from 9-5. I continued working on it all through 2008, finally finishing a first draft of it in July, just before buying a house and getting married. At the beginning of this year, I went back and started revising it. Plotlines were thrown out, new characters introduced, language changed. When I finished the second draft, I felt good, yes, but I knew there was still more to go. So I gave it to other people to read and they came back to me with very good ideas and criticism, and I set to work on this draft. Now, although I’m sure it will undergo more editing someday, I feel like it’s as good as I can get it.
And, just to show you how glamorous my life is, when I finally put my pen down, pumped my fist in the air (not unlike Bender in the final scene of The Breakfast Club), and grinned a goofy grin, I heard my cat heaving, a sure sign that something disgusting was about to happen. So I rushed over to him and put a blank sheet of paper underneath him and he puked up half-digested stalks of catnip all over it. I hope that’s not symbolic…
