How It Ends
I have once again picked up the pen and paper and have resumed my attack on my first novel, a sci-fi diddy entitled How It Ends. The first draft of the novel was published as a serial on Silverthought, and I’m now working with Paul and crew at Silverthought to get this beast ready for their 2008 queue in print form.
How It Ends has been something of a back-breaker. This being my first novel, I finished the first draft in a pretty quick clip, eight months or so. Then I had to begin the ugly process of re-writing it. While re-writing it I ended up changing whole characters around and completely revisioning the style, which may actually make the novel worse (but that’s for readers to decide).
After finally finishing the second draft, I printed the damn thing and have mostly finished a “paper” edit. Now I’ve begun the process of getting those edits back into the Word doc. I should finish it up and have it to the publisher by the end of this year, or at the latest the beginning of next year.
One of the things I’d always wanted to do was to write a novel. Now I can see how exhausting a process it is. James Frey wrote a book called How to Write a Damn Good Novel (and it’s a damn good read on how to write a damn good novel, by the way). One quote that sticks out is that you know the novel is finished when, every time you look at it, you want to throw up.
Yeah. That’s about where I am.
