Contributed by:
Tabitha Dial, YourHub.com
Article Contributed on: 7/12/2006 3:42:55 PM
Yes, you read it right. My book's condemned.
No, I'm not being negative, and yes, I do mean it. Literally condemned.
The whole thing's set in Hell. That's why.
And I think the hellish part of revising it is over. This morning I pushed on through the myth of the bathroom-humor god I created and I also finished chapter four. Of course these are revisions I did with my "bad handwroter"(Thank you,
John Lennon) and I must transfer them to the computer, but I think the icky bit's over.
I was dreading two parts of revising my book. One was that an ex-boyfriend had been revising my book at one point and had made my minor god even more memorable. Afraid I had no right to use that material after the relationship ended badly (hellishly, perhaps?), it was difficult for me to work past the second chapter until more recently, when that ex and I have renewed our friendship and he's happy to let me use what I remember about his revision.
The other ugly obstacle of my manuscript has much less emotion tied to it. When I first started writing my book in December 2002, I thought it would be clever to put this at the end of each chapter:
**********************************************
This is
not clever, dear readers! After working more and more with the text before and after those asteriks, they turned into these lines of black boxes that I never thought I could delete.
I thought I'd tried everything.
But having had this job at
YourHub.com, a couple text solutions come to mind-- I will copy and pasteeverything into Notepad and then copy and paste the manuscript into a new document.
Failing that, I'll copy and paste
around the lines into a new document.
Failing that, I'll... I'll.... I'll keep working and ask for the help of everyone I know.
While I do have big challenges ahead, such as changing my ending and adding a subplot, I think my previous fears that this project would interfere with my job are pretty silly. If I was
writing this book, yes. When I wrote it, it spilled over into all aspects of my life and I even took notes during classes. I had a world and a story to create.
Now the task isn't so great.... This far in the game.
Thanks for the read. Now, won't you please
post your story?