Old work with new eyes

[Boota]

I should finally be finishing up the final edit of my next novel, Picking On Retards, today. It's been done since April 9, 2006. I edited it one time a week later. And now it's sat on the hard drive untouched since then. Over the last week I've gotten a chance to work on it some more and I have about 130 manuscript pages left to edit. Being out of sight out of mind I was starting to doubt that it would ever see the light of day, but since I've gotten back at it the story grabbed me all over again and the writing is actually better than I had began thinking that it was.

Seeing it with new eyes has showed me some things that I might not do the same way now and I'm changing the worst offenses, but some of it I'm leaving in mainly because that's how I saw things at the time. Four years might be a little too long between edits. I'm not the same writer that I was when I first put those words down.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Re-framing experience is always a bitch, but whats sad is being the same or worse 20 years down the road.

 

[TxRad]

The first thing I ever wrote about ten years ago was a 283 page novel. About once a year I take it out of the depths of my hard drive and edit it. I add all the things I've learned and it gets better with age. Too bad there is no market for it as it's pure porn. Maybe after this years edit I'll post it here on Lit just for the fun of it.

 

[Boota]

JBJ, you're right, and I'd be pretty upset if I wasn't improving with age. Letting some of these things go through as written feels right, even if I get my balls busted for it later.

Tex, I think it's pretty cool that you've got a story that old that is still alive in your head. There's definitely something there as long as it still gets you.

I did finish my edit this afternoon and it was an experience. I had totally forgotten about a key point and I found myself thinking, "Wow! I wonder how this is going to come out?" It's kind of like when musicians put out records. You write and record the song, and then you play it every night for a year while supporting the album and eventually you figure out how you should have done it. That's kind of what the long break on editing did to me.

 

[TxRad]

JBJ, you're right, and I'd be pretty upset if I wasn't improving with age. Letting some of these things go through as written feels right, even if I get my balls busted for it later.

Tex, I think it's pretty cool that you've got a story that old that is still alive in your head. There's definitely something there as long as it still gets you.

I did finish my edit this afternoon and it was an experience. I had totally forgotten about a key point and I found myself thinking, "Wow! I wonder how this is going to come out?" It's kind of like when musicians put out records. You write and record the song, and then you play it every night for a year while supporting the album and eventually you figure out how you should have done it. That's kind of what the long break on editing did to me.

I still find the story interesting and the characters as well. The story doesn't change with edits. What changes is the technical stuff of writing itself. My last English class was when I was 18 or so. I started writing at 50. Ten years later, I laugh at what i didn't know back then or hadn't learned in my youth. English was by far my worst subject.