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It is week twelve of 2024. How’s the writing going? We’ve made it past the Ides of March now and smoother sailing is ahead. Pick a spot on the horizon and let the wind at your back carry you forward into something new. Here at the garret, March had me so bewildered this year that I somehow thought the Ides were on the 11th; I learned the truth when the 15th gave me a good hard shaking. But I’m still standing strong, reporting in here for newsletter duty before going out to enjoy some spring sunshine and, later on, some music in a little neighborhood venue I haven’t visited since before the pandemic. In my editing life, I’ve spent the last two weeks focused on content editing, giving advice on a memoir revision that needs a thorough pruning (memoirs will run rampant if you let them!) and guiding a new author into a revision of a promising first novel that I can tell she’s been holding close to her heart for a long time. Manuscripts can be the container for an author’s very deepest, most private emotions. As an editor, I try to hold these manuscripts so carefully, so tenderly while also showing authors how they can be reshaped into something stronger. The process of reshaping can feel tumultuous or bewildering, but ultimately those deep emotions at the heart of the book, which are always connected to an author’s theme and to their purpose in writing it, will show the way forward. I try to help authors trust the process. And I trust it myself as I muck around in the manuscript of my Novel Study book. I spent an hour today playing around with different titles for the book before finally returning to the original, with one tiny tweak: Novel Study: Writing Craft Lessons from Contemporary Fiction. One of my beta readers very helpfully pointed out that the phrase “Great Novels” led her to expect classics like War and Peace and that’s the very opposite of what I’m doing! I’m after the newest of the new. To that end, I picked a tenth book—finally!—that is only a few months old: Mick Herron’s spy thriller The Secret Hours, which came out in the fall and is up for a number of awards. I’m busy reading and spreadsheeting and planning out the topics I want to write about. When Novel Study was still just a blog project, I would have started writing about the book by now, but I’m finding myself hesitating to plunge in. The blog posts were, in effect, rough drafts for the book I’m working on now, and I’m going to have to find a way to capture that rough draft freedom in order to get going again. I have headings for these new chapters in my manuscript, which lives in a Word document, but I think I need to start drafting in Google docs, which is where all of my blog posts (and this newsletter) first come to life. Let’s take a quick peek at my stats, because even I am not sure what I’ve gotten done these last two weeks:
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