You Have To Love Your Own Book

In the last few days, I’ve been obsessed with Waist, my historical novel that I finished back in July. Two things happened at once: first, I finally figured out the edits I wanted to make to my first two chapters (thanks in large part to beta-reader feedback); second, I got a total of nine requests to see the first two chapters during Thursday’s #PitMad, a twitter pitching session.

Not wanting to make those agents wait and possibly lose interest, I decided the only thing to do was to edit the first two chapters right away. Since I already knew what I wanted to do, that took less time than I’d anticipated. I got that done late on Saturday, and started sending out the queries and sample pages on Sunday morning. Within four days, I did an important re-write and queried 6 agents. And it felt easy to make the time, because I was super-motivated by success at #PitMad.

But it was also easy because of something I realized while I was reading through the rest of the book, looking for anything that might have been affected by the changes in the first chapters. It was Sunday afternoon, and I had to stop editing to go to a friend’s house. When I realized it was time to stop, this is what my brain said:

“NOOO! Please, just one more chapter?”

That kind of took me aback, because that’s what my brain says when I’m reading a book I really love, particularly late at night when I’m supposed to be going to sleep.

And that’s when it hit me: I really love my book!

I already knew that I loved the idea of my book. I love the historical time period and the event I’m writing about (the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), and I believe strongly that people should learn about them through an engaging story. I love the characters that I’ve created, and the situations I’ve put them into. I love writing from multiple perspectives, and having created an entire 120,000-word piece of fiction. If I didn’t love all of those things, I would never have been able to see such a huge project through to the end, or keep fighting for it to get published.

But I hadn’t realized before that I loved the finished project, the manifestation of my initial ideas and dreams. So often, a creation doesn’t live up to the work and faith the creator has put into it. I’ve experienced that myself many times. I’m very grateful for having gotten this one so close to home.

They say you’re supposed to write the book you want to read, and I guess I did that. If no one else loves it? That’s okay. I’ll still love reading it to myself.

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