Sometimes, aspiring writers like myself should learn to just stop talking. Or writing. At the very least, blogging. Its easy to talk about books we’re writing when the only person expecting us to finish them, ultimately, is ourselves. That means its also easy to waffle, to realize that all of your hype was for nothing, or that the story you thought was great yesterday, today you realize is little more than a campy summer film with a cast of teenage actors phoning in their parts – in an age when the kids don’t even know what that phrase means!
Sometimes, instead of putting down the words, we find ourselves being forced to eat them.
I wrote a novel. I think it sucked, I boxed it up and put it under the bed. It needs a polish, it needs a partial touch up. Under any other circumstance, I wouldn’t even think of doing this. Except…and I actually hate to share this because I hate competition…Harper Collins is going to be opening their doors to unagented submissions the first two weeks in October.
And I can’t help but thinking there’s nothing to be lost here. Maybe they like it. Maybe they don’t. But this feels like one of those rare opportunities to give it a whirl and see what happens. So in those blog posts where I said my relationship with that novel was over – I’m eating those words. Then I’m going to digest them and see if I can’t get something new to come out.
Lovely metaphor, I know.
