So the moment has arrived. I can look back and see a hard copy of the rough draft of "Mary, Everything", sort of like looking numbly at a sunrise in disbelief after fourteen years in a hospital bed.
I honestly never thought I'd finish a novel ever again. I'd resigned myself to some idea that maybe I wasn't fit to be a writer, that maybe I wasn't good enough, that it might *not* be the ideal way to express myself.
As it turns out, it was the *only* way to express myself.
And now that it's done, I don't know what to do next. I mean I've been writing since I could pick up a pencil, but I've never been faced with the serious prospect of getting published before, and so I guess I'm a new writer in that sense. How is a second draft done? Where do I start? Staying motivated to work on a revision is different than staying motivated to finish a rough draft. I don't have images of an amazing, beautiful finished work of literary splendor, really...all I have are quick impulses, momentary flashes of a life that *could* be. And it's at least keeping me inching along.
But I need more serious conviction. I feel myself pausing at the edge of some precipice...what precipice that is or why I'm pausing I'm not sure. But I think I've been pausing at every inching step for the last three or four years. Something traumatized me somewhere...something made me afraid of progress.
I want to be liberated, and I want to go forward with conviction in my life and in this novel. This is what I seek...
The things you realize on an impulsive, ten minute blogging session on lunch at work...
