Editing. Day 1

I decided to go back to my first novel. I had written it during National Novel Writing Month in November 2015. Yes, that long ago.

I had to wait, as I couldn’t face the horribleness of it. I won’t lie, it ain’t pretty. My inner critic hops, pulls her hair, and cries out in terror. Yet, I believe it is time to tackle it. I wrote it just before I got convinced that writing is hard, extremely difficult and requires superhuman powers of focus and discipline. Ever since all those belief got instilled in my through writing groups, workshops, courses and challenges, I could not replicate the joy of creating a whole new universe. My first novel, my love child, stood on various shelves at different addresses and waited. I suspect that it was one of the reasons my second novel did not want to come out of me. After all, who would like to arrive in this world just to be placed somewhere out of sight and forgotten about?

Today, I started the very first read. It needs a lot of work as I wrote quickly, all action, all dialogue, no setting, no depth, just to meet the 50,000 word count in 30 days. I know I will have to rewrite it entirely, and it may still be an embarrassment, but I’m going to do it anyway. It already made me laugh and I hope that it will make someone else laugh as well.