I shared my completed first draft today with voluntary first readers. After the six months of trash draft and the few months of summer intense rewrite, it feels a little like a miracle that other people are now going to read this story.
It’s making me feel vulnerable as hell.
But being a closeted writer isn’t really a thing. It’s not how you get better and it’s certainly not how you reach readers who will hopefully connect with your stories. I articulated at the beginning of the year, in My Writing Ambition, that I wanted to be a writer, that I wanted to take my writing seriously. I have done that. I write every day, sometimes just a line, but all those lines have added up to a full story. A novel that will need feedback and more edits and more drafts and may still be rejected and I’ll start again on something new and do it again because this process has been infuriating and hard and I have never felt like myself more. I never want to shut this part of me off again.
My first readers are my friends and writers themselves — Lin, Cara, & Madeline — and I don’t know what they’ll say. They’ll probably confirm the holes I already know. They’ll probably point out some blind spots. Maybe it’s crap. I hope it’s brilliant. It’s probably somewhere in-between.
But I did the thing. I shared the draft — after an eight hour stretch at the library reading beginning to end and making final, small edits. I celebrated tonight with another viewing of Spider-Man in theaters (my fifth, but it was a new extended cut? I just love that movie) and a couple of glasses of wine. Tomorrow I’m heading to Salt Lick barbeque with friends, something I planned ahead of time for the day after my deadline.
Also, go deadlines? This is a testament to how we fill the space we have because I finished perfectly on time and nearly exactly at my estimated word count for my revised draft (80K words). What we speak becomes reality.
So for a few weeks, maybe this whole month, I’ll let Jack rest. I’ll get feedback. I’ll work on something else. Maybe I’ll just write poetry. Maybe I’ll write a magical middle-grade adventure story. We’ll see.
With Love,
Natalie