So. The first draft. It’s percolated. Enough. I’ve left it alone for a few weeks now. Almost a month. I have ideas. I really do.
I have cuts to make. Lots of them. I have things to add. New things. Surprises. More things. Less things. Red things. Blue things. Starred things. Stuff.
I’m surprised by, overall, how ok I am with where the story ends up. The journey isn’t necessarily satisfactory, but the end kind of works. At least I still think so.
No one has seen it. I was asked if I’d started showing it and I said no, and the thought of someone seeing it, in this state, was a bit revolting. I think I tasted metal.
But I have read passages in public. Twice. And I didn’t die.
I never show a first draft of anything. Second draft, yes. Not first.
I recently wrote about that time the Habs won the Stanley Cup (it used to happen on a fairly regular basis!) and I was in Saskatchewan on my way to Banff but the piece was really about The Smiths and The Queen is Dead and what that song did to me and does to me still.
What else? I have parted ways with my agent. My old agent, the one who placed Waiting for the Man, retired and I was handed over to a new one and well, the writer-agent relationship should be worth more than that. I think my first novel was my (old) agents’ last. Life is a flat circle, to paraphrase Rust Cohl, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Steve Perry and Lynard Skynard and just about everyone else….seriously, who hasn’t said that life/time is a flat circle/the wheel of life, yadda yadda yadda? It’s like a tautology or something.
So, yes, I’m agent-free and looking for an agent. There are leads. They want to see what I’m working on, but I’m not showing it to anyone yet because it’s not ready. The wheel of life, man. Flat. Like soda that’s been left out way too long. Or beer. Rust would have preferred beer.
