I have waited a long, LONG time to be able to use that header as a blog post. And as of about five minutes ago, I can. Finally.
Yes, the new novel is off my desk, delivered to Random House (well, delivered to my agent, who will midwife it to its proper home). And I could not be happier.
It's been a long road.
The concept for the new novel (which, no, doesn't have a title yet) goes back to late 2003, a stormy midwinter night that had me thinking about fathers and sons, and the power of reading. I had the idea in-hand and in-mind when I was wandering BookExpo in 2004, and had several long conversations about it with prospective editors. I wrote a one-page summary of it in late June, 2004 (which resulted in a two-book offer and deal with Random House Canada), then a 25 page outline a few months later. I settled in to write it in 2005 and… well, I wrote the opening about 38 times. I also wrote, as a result, a half-dozen short stories and two novellas (one of which was published by CZP as, yup, The World More Full of Weeping). I made the ever-important initial breakthrough in mid-2007 and spent a year writing, flat-out.
Yup, a year. That's four times as long as the first draft of Before I Wake took, which is appropriate, considering that the first draft of the new untitled novel (which I'm going to refer to as "untitled" from here on out) is more than four times as long as BIW. I worked on it at home, in New York, in Toronto, and finished the main of it somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. The closing scenes were written after several months of intense typing (350,000 words in longhand — my illegible scrawl — takes a LONG time to type), over the Labor Day weekend last year.
Since then, I've been revising. That's a year of cutting. Tweaking. Rearranging. The sort of work that starts with a chainsaw, and finishes with a scalpel. A full year of revision, before my editor even had a glimpse (though, admittedly, that work wasn't quite… dedicated. And I seem to have lost a few months this spring.) In that time, I've adored it with the tender, heartbreaking love of a gob-smacked parent, and hated it with a white-hot fury. There were times I savoured every word, and times I wanted to set the whole thing on fire and walk away. All of that, by the way, is both perfectly natural and par for the course.
Crucial to that process, and key to just how good I'm feeling about it now, is Cori, Her Esteemed Editrix herself. She knows exactly what works, and what doesn't, sees flaws before I do (and knows how to fix them) and, most crucially, knows how to ask the right questions. It's her fault I didn't deliver the book in August as I intended to — it's to her credit that the book is SO much stronger than it would have been had I made that deadline.
Ah, deadlines. I've actually lost track of how many I've… blown through and/or ignored. Oh well. It's done now.
It's done now! What a thing to be able to say.
Even if it isn't precisely true. There is still work to be done, and work I'm eager to get to: working with an editor, honing and polishing, is one of my favourite parts of the writing process. It's engaging with the most focussed, most dedicated reader your work is ever likely to have, an opportunity to look at the questions that such a reader will have at the only time you can actually ADDRESS them, and their underlying issues.
So, what now?
Well, I'm going to mark the occasion by (checks watch) going to work in a few minutes. I'm going to write a couple of overdue book reviews and catch up on some reading. There's a commissioned short story that's been hemorrhaging red ink for a few months that desperately needs triage, and a new short story to write in the next few days, a bit of a Christmas gift to my Toronto readers. And then there's the next novel to start. There's a trip to Galiano for a reading this weekend, and I would imagine a boozy dinner involving a large steak and larger quantities of gin. And a nap. God, I'm looking forward to a nap this afternoon.
And in ten days or so, I'll have my editorial first pass. So it goes.
Right now, though, I'm basking.
