Fixing leaks while still in port

I started writing the book that became YOU DON'T THINK SHE IS (the novel I'm submitting to agents) seven summers ago. It took so long to refine it and revise it because I really didn't know what I was doing as a writer. I learned from writing all of those pages, vignettes, stories, chapters, drafts... learned what worked and what didn't; learned what the story was; learned who the characters were.

Seven years is a long time, so of course, when I finally finished the 370-page NOVEL that I'd distilled from that stack of writing, I was psyched to get it out there. I researched agents, made a list of what looked like Good Matches, and told myself I'd get queries into 15 agents' hands by the end of June.

Then... I found out I had to move. Somehow, the threat of a pending move threw off all my equilibrium, and, in spite of my efforts, I simply couldn't get any of my work out there. The one time I tried submitting the book recently, I couldn't. The online submission wizard at the agent's website came back with a message: FAILURE.

Nice.

Now it's August, and even though I'm a month past my self-imposed deadline, I'm happy, in a way, that I didn't start submitting before the move. Those 5-6 weeks that I was totally preoccupied-schizzed about moving FORCED me to set the book aside and not look at it...

...and, now that I've picked it back up and looked at it, I realize that, before I submit it, there's one last step I need to take. It's the same thing I did before I submitted my final product in the MFA program at Goddard: go through the manuscript with a finetooth comb as a COPY EDITOR and PROOFREADER. Clean up awkward sentences and clunky clanky passages... scan for typos and (unintentional) misspellings... remove repetitive words and phrases... eliminate cliches... fix punctuation.

Clean it up.

As I stated in a previous post on this blog, I'm all for the Jimmy Buffett school of novel writing. But best to fix small leaks while still in port. I feel good about doing this because I'm finally happy with the book as a NOVEL and a STORY. To use a metaphor, the barber's done with the haircut... he's just brushing around and dusting on the talc and splashing on the tonic before he snaps the bib off and lets you out of the chair.

Anyway... yesterday I did the first 19 pages and wrote down 10 pages of changes. Most of them minor; a couple of them sentence or paragraph rewrites. Lots of places where punctuation (or font: italics) could be tweaked to make the meaning more clear... lots of misplaced modifiers (that's the problem with trying to write in a voice that approximates SPOKEN word)... a few places where I used a key word twice within a couple sentences of each other, and thought it best to eliminate the multiples. Lots of changing passive voice to active voice.

It's an arduous, time-consuming task... the writing equivalent of what Julia Child was talking about when she said "Every job has its share of slicing onions." But now that the important stuff is done (story, structure, character, subplot), cleaning up the technical glitches is a piece of cake. Even if it DOES make my eyes water occasionally.

Better watery eyes than a leaky boat.