Full Circle

Quote of the Week

Exactly one year ago this week I was up at 5:45am tentatively typing the first words of a novel.  And today, wrapped in my grandma’s blanket, at 11:15am I wrote the final words of the closing chapter.

It’s just the first draft.  There is editing to do and research still to be done but one year and 80,000 words later I can report two things:

1. It was hard.  Much harder than I thought it would be.
2. It was thrilling.

When I sat down last January, the only aspect of this undertaking I felt certain about was the title.  But the final thing I did today was go back up to the top of the document– all 249 pages of it– and change the title.

And today I read this about the next step in the process by Stephen King:

“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”

Leave it to Stephen King to make editing sound so gory.  And it is a little hard to swallow, coming from someone whose writing is so verbose.  But I figure he knows what he’s talking about.  Onward to editing!