(stares hollowly at screen) I think it’s a fourth draft.
Which means I get to collapse for a day, before trying to do some tightening, especially over the final chapters, over the next week. (I like when I finish drafts Friday nights, Saturday being my designated day off anyway.)
As I’ve been working on rewrites, I’ve been thinking about a couple different critique group comments.
The first was
jennifer_j_s, who said to me, after reading an earlier draft, “I never cried.”
The second was
lnhammer saying, “I did feel a catch in the throat. But not there.” And telling me where he did.
This got me to thinking about something. In my own books, I don’t get a catch in my throat during moments of loss, hard as writing those moments can be. I get a catch in my throat during moments when loss is redeemed.
So, say, in
Thief Eyes (scroll over spoilers to read)
I don’t feel that catch when Freki or even Haley’s mother die, devastating as those scenes were for me to write. But I do feel it when Haley runs by Freki’s side at the end of the book, and when thinks that now she knows what happened to her mother, and that that’s something, at least. I can think of similar moments in the
Bones of Faerie books.
Experience is hugely subjective. When I cry may not be when the reader cries. The reader may not cry at all. But knowing where I cry is important, because it provides me with valuable structural information, though I hadn’t quite articulated that until now.
The point where
lnhammer felt that emotional catch in the current book–where, when I thought about it, I felt it too–was a point that I’d been thinking of as something of an epilogue, existing out beyond the story’s denouement–beyond the story’s main inner and outer resolutions.
Except I realized my epilogue wasn’t an epilogue at all, but the thing the entire story was working towards.
This hugely informed my rewrites, of course, moving from the third draft to the fourth. And it’s something I’m continuing to think about, as I spend this next week on final revisions before sending the book off.
But first tonight and tomorrow are for stepping back, and gaining some perspective on same.
And also for trying to finally decide on a title. 🙂