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Saturday 6 October 2007

Revising

I’m working on revisions of my fantasy novel at the moment. The fact that I actually finished the first draft was amazing, but I found myself feeling very miserable afterwards. Writing ‘The End’, rather that causing the euphoria I thought it would, left me wondering ‘Now what?’ Over the time it took me to write it (years), I became very close to my characters, especially the MC. So finishing the book was akin to saying goodbye to good friends. Of course, now I’m doing the revisions, we’re renewing our acquaintance, but it’s not quite the same the second time around.
I’m also working on a sequel to the book (I love multi-tasking). It’s helping me in two ways. Firstly it gives me chance to further my friendship with my characters. I’m really enjoying the power of creating new hurdles and pitfalls for them to negotiate. My MC is growing older which means a whole new set of problems and way of dealing with them, but that keeps my brain ticking over.
The second advantage of having another book to think about is that I don’t keep fiddling with the revisions of the first. I guess it’s like painting. If you work on it too long it loses its freshness. I don’t want to do that. Having another story to work on means I’m happy to do what’s necessary then post it to Critique Circle to have the last few nits picked out of it.
Now…what was I doing?…

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