WORKIN' ON THE NOVEL

I've been working steadily on the rewrite of my new novel, SHRIEK: AN AFTERWORD for the past week, and marveling at how the imagination and the subconscious can work together to revitalize material I'd looked over maybe 20 times and been unable, in the past, to see fault in. You get a sense of snow blindness, and even a sense of disgust at your work over time. You become so familiar with it that it's like something dead--inert stone or dirt. Luckily, a little bit of time away from the manuscript seems to have helped quite a bit. Also, finishing the first draft (although parts of it are about seventh draft now) helped immeasurably. Now that I know how the story ends, I know how the light strikes the words in the earlier parts, if that makes any sense. There's a sudden fleshing out, a three-dimensional quality that I can infuse the words with due to the foreknowledge of the ending.

Anyway, I may be somewhat intermittent on this already intermittent blog for at least eight weeks as I get deeper and deeper into this thing.

JeffV