So, December, we meet at last . . .
Today I finished my Thanksgiving week read-through of the final 9.5 chapters of my novel, and as that concludes, so too does the seventh revision cycle come to an end. Between now and the start of January, I might tinker with the book a little bit, but really, I don’t plan to do anything more with it until I start the publication process through Lulu. That means I have a month to kill.
I’ll try to continue posting (I have a couple of ideas for upcoming posts), but since if I’m not working on my project, there’s very little for me to write about. Since I started this blog, I’ve been good about posting something new every 2 or 3 days. In January, I intend to document the self-publication process through Lulu, for anyone who is curious, but until then, I’m going to have to really scavenge for post topics.
I also intend to catch up on some reading. This revising project has taken up most of my free time since May, and I’ve got a backlog of books to work through. Right now, I’ve been reading a self-published novel by Ray Holland called The Hermit. It’s a political satire/bawdy comedy sort of story. After working on my project for so long, it’s good to just read something for fun. I don’t have to edit the book, or look for plot inconsistencies, or ask myself, “How could I arrange this passage differently?” I can just read the story and enjoy it.
And that, I hope, is how readers will read Leah. One of the great tragedies of being a writer who is an irredeemable perfectionist like I am is that it is impossible for me to read my own work in the way that a typical reader would read it. When I open the file, I see hundreds of little things that I could change about the text, but that’s a very different mindset from the typical reader. A typical reader might notice something glaring, like a misspelled word, but he or she won’t be worried about whether I’ve chosen the best adjective for a sentence, which is the kind of thing that I obsess over. What I hope is that a reader will read my book as easily as I can read someone else’s book, but that’s the one thing that I can’t foresee and prepare for when I revise.