The snail is almost at the finish line.

Alrighty.

 I’ve [obviously] been slack in updating the blog, but I've made great progress fine-tuning cherubs & lavender.

Last December I thought it was just about ready for copy-editing. But because I'd been immersed in it for so long, I gave myself a little distance so I could look at it objectively one final time. (Copy-editing is expensive. It's vital I have everything just how I want it. If I pay to have it copy-edited and then I rewrite chunks, I'm wasting money.) Unfortunately when I came back and reread, it felt off.

The story worked. It had its moments. But a lot of the time, and this was hard to accept... it was boring.

I wanted to think it was just me. I'm so used to the story, of course I'd think it's boring. It's not boring! It can't be boring! Because shoot, if the book needed another overhaul, that meant I was way off course. This was a ~45K word manuscript that had already devoured weeks of my life.  The first rough-draft was complete mid-late 2013. Other writers could have had a polished product ready for readers’ eyes in a fraction of the time it’d taken me to get here.

But it wasn’t just me. I paid someone to beta-read my work, and she picked up on the exact same issues I was concerned about. And found a few problems to which I was oblivious.

So I went back to rewriting and editing.

In addition to general polishing and plot-tweaking, here are the primary things I fixed:

Characters. When I wrote cherubs I wanted a short horror story that would hit you from the start and never let up. I threw a group of neighborhood kids at the reader with minimal character development and expected the reader to be happy to immediately accompany them into a haunted house.

I should have known better.

I provided no time to connect to the protagonists, which shortchanged any potential scare in my novel. Most horror comes in fearing for the characters, but to fear for the characters you have to care about them. If you’re not invested, you’re detached. If you’re detached, it’s just going to be words on a page; just actors and special effects and noise on a screen.

Repetitive descriptions. I have a tendency to over-describe things. In the process of writing I see this repetition as stylistic. A descriptive technique. Part of my art arsenal. Something the reader will enjoy. Like giving the reader photographs of a statue taken from multiple angles so the reader can appreciate the statue in all its glory.

Now imagine what I did in those last five sentences happening every other paragraph. Me elaborating on details needlessly. Using multiple analogies to describe a simple concept. My pages were filled with these types of redundancies. They clogged the story’s arteries.

Chapters. The initial design of cherubs was chapter-free. No chapters. No escape. The readers would feel they were being consumed by the story just like the children were being swallowed by the house.

I had to abandon this idea. My story didn’t feel relentless. It felt tedious. cherubs benefits from allowing time to breathe between scenes.  There’s something pleasing about reaching the end of a chapter and looking forward to or dreading what waits in the next section.

On top of that, the story was just begging to be broken up. It features a good bit of time-jumps into the past. Having one continuous take made these awkward. And even in the “straightforward” parts, I’d find drab transitional sentences connecting two parts that simply needed a chapter break.  

--

So where am I? 

Close. 

I’ll give cherubs to my friends and family to read. I’ll wait to see if anything bothers them or comes across as glaringly bad. I’ll comb over it one final time (knock on wood). And then I’ll send it off for copy-editing and it’s game on.

I paid four-hundred-something dollars for a review

Last post I wrote on the importance of reviews. Since then I paid Kirkus to review A Collection of Angels. While this means I literally paid for a review, which has an awful connotation in the implication I paid for a good review, there was no guarantee on the quality of write-up. This isn’t a dirty deed. I could have landed with a reader who hated the novella, or someone who thought it was only passable, and either scenario would have entailed a write-up I’d never want to see the light of day.

Paying Kirkus was a gamble, but I wouldn’t have taken it if I didn’t believe in the quality of my book. Still, Monday I had a moment of anxiety when I saw the email, “Your Kirkus review is ready,” a week earlier than expected. I know it’s wrong to let others dictate how you feel about your craft, but this is a professional reviewing service. They carry clout. A choice excerpt from Kirkus Reviews is much more of a selling point than “The best novel ever!” --Close Friend to Jesse. It would have destroyed my week to discover a professional reviewer had just trashed my book (at my own financial expense, no less).

Here’s the review. 

It’s not AMAZING, at no point does the reviewer actually recommend the book, but it’s not bad. I enjoy (and I say this earnestly, not facetiously) that the single criticism levied against the story is it “threatens to go overboard in creepiness.” A few sentences read awkwardly, and I’m not crazy about ending the article with "will make some cringe and others gag." In the context of the rest of the review it’s not damning, and the part of the sentence that precedes those final words is great, but taken alone, this suggests Collection is nothing more than gross-out horror, and as the last thought, it ends the review with a whimper as opposed to a bang.

So I’ve got a decent Kirkus review. What now? By itself, this review does little. But for the sake of future advertising, I can now superimpose something like:

                              “Leaves a lasting dread.

                                       An undeniably disturbing, reverberating story.” –Kirkus Reviews

on my cover, and I can also take comfort in the fact that any potential buyer browsing the book's Amazon page will see a professional reviewer's comments in addition to reader reviews. Will this prove to be worth the $400+ investment? Way too soon to tell.