Done revising!

Last night, I spent almost an entire hour debating with myself whether to cut or keep a paragraph in my “final” manuscript.

I know that I'm not the first to say it, but revisions are a bitch.

You spent all this time in front of a half-blank page, trying to put that amazing movie that takes place in your head into words because it's the most incredible thing that you've ever seen and you want to share it with everybody else. There are lives lived, loves lost, battles won...

These character deserve to be known. But, how can you do them justice?

You write. You sit down, channel your inner schizophrenic and pay as much attention as you can to the voices in your head. Then, you pour it all out into a blank word document that becomes as dear to as your own child.

So, there I was, with my inner schizo in a chokehold because there was a brilliantly written paragraph that needed to be cut.

Was it good? I thought it was.

Did the story suffer after its grammatical amputation? Not really.

I had someone else read it over. It worked.

And I realized that even though what I had written may have been good, it wasn't a necessary part of the story. Still, it was a hard decision to make and to appease myself, I pasted the cut paragraph in a document I had aptly named, “Deleted Scenes and Cut Stuff”, and told myself that I was just storing it to use later. Maybe I'd recycle it in a sequel or something. Inner Schizo knew better though, poor Uza will probably never see the light of day, but he will forever live in the eerie shadows of my mind.

The thing is, that it's never easy to go over your own work and be objective. Nothing will ever be good enough, and no amount of revising can ever lift it up to your standards. So you have to learn to be fair, not with yourself, but with those special characters that count on you to introduce them to the rest of the world.

Anyway, I was finally done with revisions yesterday and I gotta say, it's looking good.

Don't miss Shadow Riser, coming soon to an electronic bookstore near you! ;)


~DB