I exited the blogosphere for a month to concentrate all my writing time on responding to the developmental editing notes I received as part of the process of getting my novel, Internal Lockdown, published, hopefully, this fall.
The novel is about the terrifying situation of being on the inside of a lockdown when an intruder with a gun is in a high school. (More on the novel itself in another post.)
Getting twelve pages of single-spaced notes back from the editor after she apparently muddled through what I thought was a pretty good draft was, to put it mildly, unsettling.
The teacher-student shoe was on the other foot.
When I graded my students’ papers, easily my most often used plea was to FOCUS.
Guess what my editor told me to do. Several thousand times. FOCUS.
When I read the notes for the first time, in a Sunday evening email, I saw only the negative comments. As my students used to do. Then I went to bed so I wouldn’t sleep.
Then came panic, followed by the realization that I suck.
Upon rereading the notes, I discovered that there were many positive comments written also. Hmm. I set to work then, sometimes putting in eight, ten, twelve-hour writing sessions when my real life did not interfere.
All the while, I heard the editor’s voice in my head, even though I have never spoken to her. She sounded like George Carlin in a really bad mood.
Revision is painful. Any writer can tell you that. To my credit, I realized that as a teacher, and I tried to be as gentle and helpful as possible during the revision process.
It took about thirty days of adding, deleting, moving paragraphs, swapping chapters, but the draft is finished and shipped off.
Do I have a better story now? I think so. I hope so.
I hope George Carlin feels the same way.
The Q-View 