Seven Chapters In

Back in January, I put Doleful Creatures away.

I’d completed 17 edits, and while it was getting closer by degrees to what I wanted the book to be, it was time to give it a rest.

Then today, a slack day at work I knew about beforehand. So I brought both electronic and hard copy manuscripts, complete with notes and fixes.

I’m through the first seven chapters. I’ve cut two chapters of 2,144 words, added 616, for a cut of just over 1,500 words. And I can finally see the story coming out.

I’m going to go about this slow. No more promises of having the book ready by the end of the year. Because ha ha ha ha ha I’ve been saying that for four years now. The book will be ready when it’s ready, and not a second before that.

But that’s okay.

I want this to be the best book I can write.

Inspiration has shifted a little. I’ve gone from Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH to Walter Wangerin, Jr.’s Book of the Dun Cow. I’m not as hopeless without guarantees as Wangerin, but I’m not as crisp as O’Brien.

What I’ve got to figure out is this: Humans or no? In which period does this book take place – on the evening of the fifth day [of Creation] or on the morning of the sixth? The more I look at it, the more I need humans involved in this. And they can be. Just in the peripheral way they’re involved in Watership Down or NIMH. We shouldn’t know any of their names. Just what they do intersecting with the animal world I’m creating. That was the big hangup that made me put the book aside in January. So maybe I’m past that.

And maybe one of these days I’ll write a funny book. But funny books, they seem hard. This is a serious book, and it’s taking me forever. I may not be cut out for funny.