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truepennyYesterday, 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-23 04:43 am (UTC)Request an extension.
(A totally unsolicited opinion from someone who knows nothing about the publishing business. However, if this just means that we might not get the last book in our hot little hands as soon as we'd like, hmph! The last time I was this caught up in a series it was Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond chronicle which took fourteen years to get to the end of the story. I can wait.)