A Non-Literary Costume For A Fantastic Holiday

I'm an author. Of kid lit and comedy. The two most juvenile genres around (one more literally than the other).

Of COURSE I love to play dress up.

Happy Halloween to all the kids out there. I may be an adult, but I will NEVER be a grown-up.

Naked

Anyone who knows me knows that I don't talk about emotions.

I use sarcasm to deflect them, or skim over them by moving the topic to something else (something sillier), or watch Doctor Who until they recede for the time being.

Generally, I'd prefer to pretend like they don't exist at all.

Which is why I'm feeling a little raw about the essay that went up on Elle today. It's possibly the most "out there" I've ever made myself, and it's unavoidably emotional.

So please read it, because lord knows I don't want to do something so against nature for NOTHING.

Then let's all put our skins back on and make self-deprecating jokes again.

xx,
j

Playing Dress-Up

So I'm in the middle of revisions right now (as you likely know, since I've mentioned it about every third minute since they started), which means I'm doing what any reasonable writer would:

I'm finding other things to do.

One of those is constructing my frankly AWESOME Halloween costume, in which I:

Will transform into this: 

Let me tell you all, so far I'm NAILING it. 

But that's not really the point of today's word-vomit. Today's barely-formed idea is that as authors, we're basically just playing pretend, constructing costumes that we hope pass muster, day in and day out. 

Verbal Tics

A little over a month ago I was lucky enough to receive a critique on a work in progress from a children's and YA agent. I opted to send in the first chunk of a still-unfinished first draft of a manuscript. I figured if there were any major issues that were already apparent, it might be good to know about them BEFORE I had written another 100+ pages; it's always easier to reshape something that you know is totally unfinished, while typing that last word of that last page has a way of immediately making editing more painful (at least for me).

She offered loads of good suggestions, big and small, including this one: "stop focusing on everyone's eyes so much."

She'd only seen 25 pages, but already people's eyes were large, widening, narrowing, blinking back tears furiously, and generally working to convey about 75% more of the emotional content stuff than they should have been.

This is what all my characters look, and think, and feel like.

Hopefully I would have noticed, and been appropriately terrified by, my weird ocular obsession on my own during a good edit, but more than likely more eyeballs than were strictly necessary would have remained on the page.

REVISIONS.

So the current young adult book has probably been revised fully 10 times, partially a couple dozen more. I got it to a point where I wasn't happy with it--when is anyone ever happy with it?--but where I knew that I no longer knew what to do with it.

This is when you're supposed to query, right?

Long, boring, recognizable-to-all-authors story short, I was ready to leave it on the back burner, at least for a little while, because I couldn't fix it alone.

Then I really and truly lucked out. I got COPIOUS notes on the manuscript from an agent, the kind of notes that make yet another revision feel worth it, since I have someone confirming my instincts about where it's going off the rails, and I was able to move it onto the front of the stove again (has anyone ever tried to extend this metaphor beyond the back burner before? It's a little awkward...).

Which brings me to:

REVISIONS ARE THE HARDEST THING EVER.