Happy N-Day!
Haha! Three months later, I'm back at work editing and rewriting my first novel! I'm calling it "N-Day" because the title of my book begins with "N" and I'm paranoid about people stealing my stuff.
I decided to take Stephen King's et every other novelist who has written some kind of writer's guide's advice and waited three months between the completion of the first version and the start on the edit. It's a bit of a daunting task; almost four hundred one-sided pages to go through, with details to add or remove or modify, timelines and culture info to check, looking for every spelling and grammatical mistakes that I missed before and double-checking all the spellings of the names of the characters--and there's a lot of weird names there. I have my favorite red pen for corrections, my green pen to mark off the corrections that have been added to the second manuscript, my small notepad of info and ideas I kept, and a pad of sticky notes to write down extra ideas as I come across them.
I actually started writing this story back in sixth grade, and I clung to it like white on rice--and that was thirteen freaking years ago (which makes N-Day even more special!). I started to rewrite it at the end of high school, then I was able to get a private class in college that let me just sit there and write it as long as I wanted. Greatest semester of my life.
That huge folder has been sitting by my desk chair for weeks, and every time I looked at it my Creativity Demon would reach to it frantically and squawk, "I want I want I want!!!" I could have started on it at the beginning of the month but I decided to wait until the 14th, just for symbolic value. A kind of book birthday. N-Day. It feels good, as though a missing part of my life has come back. The day will soon come where it's totally completed, but I already have a sense of satisfaction at the thought. It took me thirteen years to write it, but it'll be finished, and I can proudly proclaim that.
The Creativity Demon is dancing around on my bed in a frenzy, screeching that I better work on "N" or work on a short story to submit or something or there'll be hell to pay. I'd better go do something before she goes berserk and I'm up until 1 a.m., writing furiously.
See ya.
Chiyome
