The Edit Letter hits you. Roll d20 for damage.

[truepenny]

Yesterday, my editor emailed me her editorial notes on Corambis. I need to sit down with my inner twelve year old, I think, and explain that, no, the edit letter is never going to be an affirmation that I am a beautiful, unique, talented, and sparkly snowflake. Especially the edit letter on something I already knew was severely flawed.

But it was still kind of ouch-like, reading her comments and seeing from them just how far the book I turned in was from the book I want it to be.

(I am having a really hard time not devolving into LOLcat:

I HAS EDIT LETTER

DO NOT WANT

Because not only is that factual, it also sums up pretty nicely the emotional register of my response. :P )

In the broadest terms, what's wrong with the book is two things:

1. The first half is not commensurate with the second half. It's like the front half of a pantomime horse yoked to the back half of a mortar. (No, THIS kind of mortar.)

2. As with The Mirador, the first time through this story I was patently thinking with my genre conventions, and that is wrong wrong wrong.

Oh, and one more:

3. There's a scene in the middle which is psychologically true, and which has been bumping around in my head since I started working on this sprawling monster of a story (I don't really see the four books of the series as four separate stories; that's why I can say decisively that book four is the last book, because I've known the arc, in vague and frequently obfuscated forms, all along), but which I did a fairly rotten job of making narratively inevitable. And I somehow forgot to think about aftermath and consequences and all the stuff that makes a scene part of a story instead of an isolated event.

In even broader terms, the book is a quagmire.

Unless I crack and beg for an extension, which will involve throwing off the production schedule, I have to have the damn thing cleaned up, complete with shining canals and habitats for rare species of waterfowl, by December first.

I may be a little tense and irritable for the foreseeable future.

Just so y'all know.

Comments

Should I ever get published

[phoenix-alpha.livejournal.com]

I think I will automatically go to this entry to remember that any editor comments about needing change is not for me alone.
Have fun, good luck and thanks for the warning.
(PS: Aren't you done yet with those changes? They're waiting you know... ducking!)