August ended with a bang, and by a bang, I mean the sound of my laptop hitting the floor so hard the screen broke.
The jaw-dropping expense of a new laptop screen is nothing to the expense of a new laptop, so I dragged myself through September with a sad mishmash of phone apps and cloud files edited on my husband’s laptop.
Side note: PC TRACKPADS ARE THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE
My husband is very lucky that 1, I am a cheapskate who refuses to replace two laptops, and 2, that our house only has one floor. If we were in a Queen Anne or better yet, a brownstone, I would have heaved the plastic shell holding this piteous excuse for a trackpad out of the nearest window with many an epithet.
I suppose I am lucky too, because if I threw his laptop out the window then I’d be trying to edit a 480-page document on my phone, but really, it would only be marginally worse than attempting to work with an epically craptastic trackpad.
If anyone so much as mentions a mouse, they will be joining the laptop in the defenestration queue.
Moving on!
The book is with the beta readers. I fully expected them to go the way of five green and speckled frogs once they had gotten past the shiny idea of the book to the messy reality, but so far all of them have completed section one. I am also surprised to report that the feedback-management backend is holding up ok, shoelaces, duct tape, and all.
My anxiety over putting my book in readers’ hands settled slightly after the first feedback, which came from a very old friend and terrifyingly perspicacious reader who managed to simultaneously point out many things that were wrong with the story and make me feel awesome about it.
Overall, feedback on the world has been positive. I cackled with delight when a reader’s feedback told me one of my main characters landed as I hoped they would. Better, they have all found this world important enough to ponder. All the questions, all the whys and hows, have been my favorite part of the process. I love digging apart the minutia of the fantasy worlds that pull me in, stab me in the heart a few times, and spit me out the other end. Being able to finally do that with my own fantasy world is an amazing feeling.
Some feedback has been humorously contrary, but other pieces have been…distressingly consistent.
For instance, none of my beta readers are psychic.
It’s a little rude.
But apparently in the pursuit of my target word count, I pulled ninety-five percent of a major character’s complicated backstory. A handful of sentences alluding to their tortured past remained, but these did not paint a sufficiently detailed picture to give the character the kind of handles a reader needs to hang on to.
Additionally, comments were made about the number of characters. As in they did not find it helpful to have twenty-five characters thrown at them with minimal description in one chapter.
Which leads to my other September problem.
In August, I was not going to touch a single word of my draft until everyone was utterly and completely done. But as the 10,000 author advice accounts on Instagram smugly declare, the issue with the dragging middle of my book was not in the middle at all. It was at the beginning.
Sooo…
I dumpster dove.
In the dumping folder of old drafts, I rummaged until I found that chapter. That one that had ninety-five percent of a character’s backstory. And the backstory of the world, which will probably also come in handy as well. And I found its next-door neighbor, another chapter I was so proud to take out.
Dear reader, I put them back in.
We shall not discuss the current word count.
But at least section two is with the readers, and if I can remember how to write, section three will get its final once-over before going out into the world. I spent three weeks responding to reader comments, discussing reader comments, and making notes about reader comments. When I went back to my computer to look at section three, my brain made a loud staticky noise and refused to power up.
The writing will come back, it always does, but I foresee several mornings where I will spend an hour blearily staring at the same paragraph and wondering what a proper sentence looks like.
In the meantime, I would love to wax poetic about the delightful literary activities I am going to pursue this October, but let’s be real. We have a family birthday, Fall Break, and Halloween. Halloween, for those of you who were unaware, is the best holiday of the year. We will be participating in multiple Halloween events, and I will be dressing up with the smol humans and my husband. There are wooden headstones to place, pumpkins to carve, and costumes to make.
I will get the final section of the book out to readers, I will keep the smol humans alive in spite of their best efforts during fall break, and we will all tumble across the threshold to November in a sticky, pumpkin-scented daze.
