Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Me and My Fiction

I have set a goal. I want to finish my... for lack of a better word... novel, "Oops," said God, by the end of 2012 along with finishing my MLS and being a half decent mom and wife. Go crazy, or go home. I have put the first half on this blog in a couple of installments, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That is not quite half of what I have written, but I am a little tentative about posting anymore. It's a rough draft. I don't even want to qualify it as a first draft, and that's fine. It is part of the writing process. But along with the heavy revisions that will eventually need to be done, there are lots of typos and other copy-editing issues as I am, after all, a human being. I am also a former editor and English teacher. I have grammar issues. I am a grammar snob. I proofread tweets. If a mistake gets by me, it takes quite a while for me to get over it, if ever. I will never get over my recent Oval House tweet.
This makes it hard for me to post anymore of my fiction. The amount of problems in the parts already posted haunt my nightmares. I want to proofread it before posting. If I start to do that, I start to revise and edit, and that is not where I am in the process. I need to pound out the rest of the rough draft before I start any rewrites. I need the whole arc in front of me before I start twisting it into knots and then cutting them out.
Thus, I am torn. I want to share, but I don't know if I can share when the writing is in this state. There is a part of me that kind of wants to delete the other posts, but my poor blog is so pathetic, I can't afford the lose of five whole posts.
So, my reader(s), what do you think? Am I being overly snobby or justified? If I do post, I need a favor. I need help reaching my goal. I need people breathing down my neck about my goal. I need the goal turned into a deadline.
And now I shall fear hitting the PUBLISH POST button because I know there's a typo or grammatical problem in here somewhere.

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1 comment:

  1. JohnJanuary 19, 2012 at 6:46 AM

    The reason why I'm so hesitant to actually write fiction, at all, is because I fall so "in love" with my words that I can't progress without editing in place. Like Hemmingway was always looking for the perfect sentence, then the perfect paragraph, I do the same.

    When I post a blog post, almost always, it's "write to the end, and then hit publish, and then clean it up afterward," because, otherwise, I'll just sit around in circles & never get anything out.

    All of this is saying . . . I'd say that you should publish. Your readers, meager though the number may currently be, want to read. And, you'd be very, very surprised to see where help will come from.

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