My Lily

I’ve been feeling rather overwhelmed with my writing lately particularly, the book that I’m writing. I got to the point where I just didn’t want to even look at it anymore. When I did look at it, I felt frustrated and just plain confused.

I thought that I’d done the hard part—writing it. But reflecting back, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Actually writing the whole bones of my children’s book, which from this moment onward I will be referring to as Lily, took me about six months—that was two years ago.

Lily is over 25,000 words and that might not seem so long for a lot of people, particularly those who have written novels with 80-100,000 words or love reading full-length novels, but to me it is enormous.

I got lost in the words, I didn’t know which way was up or what was right or inside-out. If you asked me what the theme of my book was, I couldn’t tell you because somewhere in the 20,000+ words and the two years I’ve been writing, it got lost. Why was I even writing this book?

I’ve had numerous people read Lily at different stages, all of whom have been so incredibly encouraging and also offering their opinions and suggestions, which have helped me to continue to move forward. Thank you!

A couple of months ago I printed Lily off again. Completely disillusioned with reading her on the screen I thought, if I have her on paper, then maybe I’d be able to make some more sense of this absolute mess I’ve made of her.

I started reading and chucked her down with disgust, I was bored after the first page! She went on the pile on the desk. You know, that annoying pile that keeps growing and nobody actually knows what’s in it.

I have a wonderful husband, he’d read Lily two years ago, when I triumphantly and incredibly naively, pushed back from the computer and announced, “I’m done!”

He took her up again and began to, in my opinion, labour through the manuscript. I couldn’t watch him read, so I left him to it. Walking in and out of the room on the days he was reading Lily, I could see him writing and marking things, circling and crossing out. When he finished, this is what he handed me:

 

 I couldn’t believe it. First of all, he actually read through the whole manuscript and then secondly, he said there were times he couldn’t even stop reading when he knew that he should stop and write a comment. What an encouragement.

I know that giving a spouse or someone who loves you very much something to critique isn’t the best choice, if you want an unbiased opinion. But really, I didn’t need an unbiased opinion I needed someone to say, “Keep at it. I enjoyed reading it. There is a lot more here that you can fix, but it’s fixable and I believe in you.”

So, here goes, another edit. According to my computer count it’s number 38 but really that was only after I actually started counting and we’ve changed computers and moved country and interstate in between.

Who knows where this next step will take me.