The Home Stretch

Vacation's come and gone--way too fast for my taste! Sometimes I think the best part of getting away is the anticipation.

Work on DAMAGES is going quite well. After a kick in the slats from my crit partner, I realized what I want to do with this is a semi-rewrite before submission. All I have to do is reorder some events in the book, go through one last time (staying focused all the while), and whip it into shape.

Rewriting, though I've done it in the past, is a real challenge for me. Some authors love doing it. That's not how I'm wired together. I think in me, it's a hangover from childhood. I've seen it in my kids: once they WRITE SOMETHING, put it down on paper, it has a life of its own. "Change this," I advise my daughter, "put in some punctuation, tell us his name..." She looks at me like I've gone bonkers. If it's down on paper, it exists as it is. Change it?

I'm thinking that's my mindset. Once I type it in, easy-edit computer function notwithstanding, I tend to get a prejudice to keep it intact.

This isn't to say I don't edit. But on occasion I've been advised to make a love story into a mystery, or change everybody's motivations, or whatever. I keep wanting to respond, "But that's not what happened!"

Once I write it, it lives, somehow. Very difficult to tweak it then. I just thank God I cued into this misguided mindset at all. It took my kids to teach me.