My Manuscript is in the Shop Again

It has been a very long time since I've done any rewrite in The Story of Q beyond a little superficial surgery here and there. It's mostly been a stable and complete-feeling book.

I've been contemplating some of the critical rejection notices (some of which process you saw echoed in my May 22 entry). The conclusion that I reached was that their complaints and feedback were not accurate or helpful, but that nevertheless, yes, the book has a major weakness. What should be the emotional centerpiece, or at least one of the major emotional centerpieces, was glossed over and described from a detached distant vantage point instead of being properly caught in vivid prose.

The love interest of the story is the girl from Massachusetts who shows up with her family in the summer between junior and senior year in high school. In its current form, the book covers that visit with scarcely a single actual conversation.

Not one of my beta readers or editors from lit agents or publishing houses have ever highlighted that as a problem. I don't know why. Now that I see it I can't unsee it. My book has some really vivid sections, but this event, which totally needs to be one of them, just isn't.

I know how that happened: it is painful for me to write. It is painful in part because I want to capture exactly how it was, and it's elusive for me, because I sealed up some of those memories because of how things turned out, so it is frustrating to try to evoke just what happened between us and the rhythms of how we spoke and interacted. And then it is painful because even after all this time it's still ripping scabs off. And it is painful because when I do write of it, it is inadequate. But if it is, it will still be far better than the woefully inadequate handling that these scenes received up until now.


Bloody hell. Then I have to find a way to trim some other stuff or else accept a longer word count.


———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts