22 little boxes

Last Saturday, S and I had a meeting over august chagrin. He had read through the manuscript before he went to NYC to open his Lizzie Borden rock musical, and he marked it up quite a bit - but not so much as to be overwhelming. He told me then that he feels like the novel is "almost there." He also said it is "eccentric" and "sometimes disorienting," all things which I loved to hear. A couple of other people I know have also read the manuscript. I don't know them as well as I know S, but I have heard from other people I know that the sex in the novel made them uncomfortable. I'm okay with that. For a while just before I finished, I worried about that a little bit; being that I'm not an avid reader, I was worried if I was writing literature or pornography, but S calmed my fears.

I really wish I was a better reader, a more avid reader. I thought of something interesting the other day: It's okay for people to love to read but hate to write, but it's not okay for people to love to write but hate to read. Writers are expected to be avid writers, and I'm not. I don't hate to read - not really - but I don't love it either. I'm a slow reader so it's such an investment of time, and it sometimes takes me a while to really get into a book. Oftentimes, in those cases, I'll put the book down and never get back to it.

I've been going to a book club on and off for the past several months. I've read two books I love (one, Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor, I'd already read several times previously, it was the reason I joined the group; the other was a new discovery, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, a delightful find), and I've read two books in the group that I didn't like too much, one of them I couldn't read more than 100 pages of and therefore didn't go to the book club that month. I found out at the more recent book club that only one person in the group (the woman who picked the book) loved it. Anyway, it's good for me to be in this book club because it kind of forces me to continue to the end of a book that I otherwise might have put down - well, one out of two. The one I did get to the end of, Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, I didn't like the first 175 pages of, but liked the last 125 a lot, so there you go...

So, anyway, after my meeting with S, I corrected the little things in the manuscript that I could do so easily - things like deleting sentences or sections of text or moving parts of the text to other parts of the page or chapter, correcting typos, etc. - but the other, bigger edits, I flagged with purple post-it notes and made notes in a separate notebook with the chapter number, page number and so forth, and a little box to be checked off when the task is completed. My goal a while back was to finish the novel by my birthday (at the end of October). I thought I had finished early (on August 7th I finished writing the last chapter of the novel), but then S read through the manuscript and made his marks.

From our meeting I have 22 things in the novel that need to be worked on, 22 little boxes to check off in the next 29 days. As I get through with them, I am adding them to the august chagrin blog as "revised." But I'm still having to work and going to two improv classes a week and trying to keep up with my new and old blogging. It's a lot. I may drop out of sight for a while to finish the novel, in case you're wondering.