Actually, I'm not really back to the drawing boards, but to a particular giant word document of mine.

Last time I wrote a journal, I spoke perkily about my endeavors to get published.  They did not end in overwhelming success!  However, I'm happy about them, because I at least made the step toward contacting agents.  I'd like to say that three of the six I wrote to were really incredibly polite and gracious in their refusal, so that was salve to the automatic disappointment.  However, it also got me thinking...

The first time I submitted my novel, The Art of Dying, to a contest, my failure to place inspired me to retitle it, and then to completely re-edit it, which I did in a leisurely fashion over the course of nine months or so.   This next round of rejections has, it turns out, RE-inspired me to do still more editing.  You see, in the time between getting rejected and now, I started reading about Kathryn Stockett (author of the wonderful 'The Help), who admitted that she got rejected...SIXTY times   Each time she got a new set of rejection letters, apparently she attacked her novel again, editing it into its now fantastic final form.  

Well, if Kathryn Stockett realized that rejections might be a good spur for perfecting her work, I can realize that too.  Because, leaving aside the plot of my novel, what is for absolute sure is that it is far, far (FAAAAR) too long.  It is 190,000 words, or 290 pages.  It is incredibly bulky and cumbersome.  I also love it to pieces, hehe.  But at last I have gained the maturity as a writer to take out the scalpel and wield it without remorse.  (It helps that I'm saving a copy of the original draft, in case I have regrets later!)  So for the past four weeks or so, I've been reading the novel carefully, and cutting out words, or sentences. or paragraphs or even occasionally whole pages that are not necessary to the story.  That's not to say that they aren't well chosen and well written.  Often the bigger passages that have to go are vignettes that are quite dear to me.  Do they contribute to the final goal of the book, though?  No, they do not.  And now I am able to see that and cut them out.  This makes me rather happy, even if I'd rather not be editing the novel for the fourth time, heh.

I'm now three chapters into the process.  I've cut out 15 pages, which is also about 15,000 words.  If the same rate continues, I'll cut around 60,000 wds, and 60-65 pages.   I think then my novel will be more itself, in a way, and less encumbered by needless embellishment and extravagance.   I also think that a 130,000 word novel will be a bit more appealing to agents.  It's still pretty long, but not impossibly so, don't you think?

Anyway, it's sort of an interesting process to be becoming a minimalist as I mature as a writer.  I'm enjoying the process, frankly.  I'm happy to report that my current novel, House of Mirrors is almost 3/5's of the way done, and is only 55,000 words so far, so that's a much more promising beginning.  With any luck, it won't ever need me to go back and perform surgery on it!  That will be a good feeling, I must admit.

Cheers!
~solaric