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Monday, March 3, 2014

The End


Fifteen years after a horrifying dream left its imprint on my psyche, 9 years after I used that dream for a short story assignment in college, and 4 years after my attempts to edit that story ballooned into a novel of proportions beyond my skill set, I have completed the first draft of The Bloodsong Swords.

It is gloriously flawed and virtually unreadable. It is wrought with redundancies, with instances told rather than shown, with cliché turns of phrase, and info dumps. But within that are magical moments. Characters with yearning. Unique settings. There is a story that wants, indeed demands, to be told. 

My goal is to weed out all of the mundane and amateur and present to the world a version of this story worth telling. I feel obligated to do justice to the people and places that have lived in my unconscious mind for all these years. There is a lot of work left to do and I will admit that I am dreading the mountain of rewrites. There are points of view to eliminate, scene after scene in need of fresh envisioning, an entire restructuring.

Typing "The End" is only the beginning. I am up to the task even if I do feel like I'm in over my head. I've come to enjoy the writing process that once terrified and frustrated me. I can finally call myself a novelist. Up next: published novelist.


2 comments:

  1. Congrats! I know how much this means to you and how hard you have been working for this!

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  2. Congratulations! When you told me yesterday you'd finished, I expected tears, like there was the week before! I can understand the "wow, so much left to do!" but I am proud of you! I know you're going to be an author that is on the lips of everyone!

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