The writing life
(hide your eyes if you hate these passages)

It's amazing how dejected I can get into when I have a problem in my book that I'm not sure how to solve. It's not that I get depressed, exactly; more like anxious, because I have to start working through it immediately or I'll just continue to be annoyed. Someone made a suggestion recently and I wasn't sure how to fix it, or whether it should be fixed at all. I didn't want to delete a lot of stuff from the novel if the stuff was actually good, just based on one person's opinion. Then again, I was tired of some of the passages, too...but that could be from reading the book for four years. It's very easy to lose perspective after a while. I could ask my agent about it, but I try to save that for when I really need to, because good agents are usually busy.

But I had the last two days to play with some revisions, and after three-four hours of reading and making notes on the pages, I figured out just what I wanted to do. I felt much better. Now it seemed easier to tackle the other problems of the world, which had seemed worse when I was feeling pissy over not even having my novel to count on.

This could happen again in about a week, but hopefully I'm almost done with major revisions. Of course, if we send it out and editors say, "Do this" or "Do that," I'll be sucked back in.

There are some paragraphs with great description that no longer fit or move the plot along. I hate to kill them, but I put them in my "refuse" file. Someday, I might put them back.

But here is a paragraph I like a lot that's staying in the new novel:

He was soon back among farmland. The sun sprayed its rays
over yellow, dessicated corncobs. Rusted factory equipment
was stashed here and there. The air smelled sweet, and he
held his head back to face the sun.