Dangerous confidence

I went to a book signing tonight. Marissa Meyer was at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, promoting her novel Cinder.  I unfortunately missed the reading, due partly to my propensity for tardiness and partly to a wrong turn at Albuquerque, but it seemed to have been a very nice reading, and the bookstore was lovely. The author herself was sweet and charming and well-spoken, and her signature message is adorable: "May the glass slipper always fit." (The book is now on my shelf, trying to cut in front of the other books on my to-read list. I think it's about to get into a fistfight with my copy of Anna Dressed In Blood.)

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Seeing people promote their books-- hearing authors talk about their careers-- inevitably makes me desperate to be one of them. I feel like telling people, I'm like you! I'm an author, too! You can't see it, but I'm almost done, and soon my book will be published and it will be on the shelf like yours! Even though it's not finished yet. But it's almost there, and it makes me crazy with anticipation sometimes. And ambition, as well. 

The thing about writing is that until you are published-- until you have an actual, physical, beautifully-bound book with your name on the cover-- authorial ambitions are generally seen as empty daydreams. "Yes, dear, you want to write a book, just like everybody else. Maybe you'd better do something else in the meantime-- you can always write in your spare time!" 

And I want to say, No! Not me. I can do this. Other people might give up, but I'm going to make a career as a writer. Someday I'll have a whole row of books on the shelf, each more beautiful than the last, and people will see them in the bookstores and point them out to their friends. And then their friends will pick up one or two of them and take them to the register, and maybe read them and fall in love with them and point them out to their friends, later. And all the while I'll be writing more.

And on that note:

I am feeling really good about this novel.

Something in me cringes when I say things like that. I know it's silly, but I've always felt a little leery of mentioning my hopes and expectations-- like I'm tempting fate to say I'm confident something good will happen soon.

But it's almost done. I am approaching the final conflict. Being finished isn't the end, of course. I'll have to circle around and do the beginning again, because that's how my stories always work. That was actually what led into this rewrite: I thought I was doing a sort of prologue (or something; it's all a blur now), and it turned out that the prologue was better than the main story, and also that my characters were much more plausible as adolescents than as adults. So I started over, and reworked the whole thing as YA, and ended up with an entirely different story. I'm hoping that's not about to happen again: there are some other scenes that need to go in at some point, and I'm half afraid one of them will start a tangent that will spin out of control and take over the book again.

(Did I mention that I'm hand-writing all this? And have been doing so since August? From now on the rough draft gets TYPED, y'all.)

But I think it's going to work this time. I really do.

This is the closest I've ever been to finishing a novel. I have finished a rough draft before: SNOWBERRY, my NaNo project from... 2008? 2009? It was a massive pile of loops and knots, though, and I gave up on editing it after the second try. I do plan to come back to it, using what I've learned from this project, but as it stands I've now advanced much further on CREATURES than I ever did on anything else. It's a little scary, in a way, because it means I don't quite know how to behave. It's also seriously exciting-- the thought of finishing makes me giddy sometimes!

I know that finishing the book is only the beginning. There are agents to wow, and then the publishing industry to navigate, and maybe nothing will ever come of it at all, even after all this. But... I can't help but feel pretty confident about it. I've learned so much, and I really work hard. I'm doing my best to find things myself that other writers would point out in critique groups-- that I would point out in critique groups-- and to fix them before the story ever sees the light of day. I think the story is original. I think, when it's finished, it will be really good.

I just have to finish it.

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Other notes (aka off-topic ramblings):

I have learned a lot during the past few months of intense writing. (I'm hanging out at my mom's house while she tolerantly allows me to work on my Life's Ambition-- thanks, Mom!<3) The thing that I have learned is... I have to start over. I do. It's just how I roll, apparently. I make a knotty roller-coaster of a first draft, put it aside, summarize what happens, and start the second draft from scratch, using the summary as a guideline.

That's what I'm doing with the (belated) holiday story, which I swear you'll get to see as soon as it's finished. (I'm sharing it with the local SFF writers' Meetup in a week and a half, which is both thrilling and terrifying for me-- I've never read for them before.) I'm almost done with it now. The only problem is that I'm not sure exactly what happens when you light a tree on fire in winter-- and I don't exactly want to go outside and find out by experimentation. I'm a little worried, because I'm pretty sure some of my group-mates know more about burning wood than I do.

Ahem. Anyway. So: CREATURES (which might be called ANIMUS? I still haven't decided.) The thing is that I can see it becoming a book. I think of it more as The Book That Is Almost Done than as The Project That May Someday Be A Book. It's a sizable difference, as I'm sure my friends who've written novels before would agree. I've started imagining covers-- the story's complete enough that I can imagine covers. (Though it's not complete. Not by any means. And by that I mean... edits. Oh, the edits.) I think it might actually be a book people will want to read, too, not just a fevered dream they might look at and think they imagined later.

One of the funny things is that some of the really strange stuff from the climax-- the stuff I thought would never make it to the second draft-- is, indeed, popping up on its own. Which suggests it's not just filler made from the fevered daydreams of someone who Just Wanted To Be Done, but an actual, integral part of the story. (Which, inevitably, requires development earlier in the book-- did I mention there would be edits?)

I have bitten the bullet and decided to allow the story to be a romance. The romantic element has been in my head all along, but I wasn't allowing myself to write it because I thought it would sound... too much like a romance. It's always been "canon" in my head that the characters in question would get together after the book; I just wasn't sure it would be believable, as things are currently written, for them to unite sooner. So that's partly what this next phase of tweaking will be about.

And that's the news from Lake Woebegone, etc.