Well, it happened... I'm published. And quite embarrassed about it, to be frank. After 2years in the process, This is Terrible: The Writer's Lament is in print and available at The Word Shop, or from myself. It's a compilation of works from various writers associated with the Word Shop and particularly the First Tuesday Writers group. My submissions include a ten-minute exercise and a long short-story written at age 14 and edited and rewritten for years afterwards.
The last time I looked at Foul Weather Friends was when I submitted the final draft 2 years ago to the publishing project. Happy to have it finally out of my life, it seems almost foreign to see it in print all of a sudden. With my name on it. Ahhhh crap.
On first perusal, it's actually not too bad. The first thing that struck me was simply this: too many words. Just too many altogether. I wrote things elaborately, thoughtfully, skillfully actually, but they could have been stated much simpler. I definitely was reading O'Brian at that point. He has better command of the wordiness, though.
I suppose if anyone out there was even remotely interested in reading it I've probably turned you off by this point. However, you will be interested to know that the book features many great works by skilled and entertaining writers. Totally worth it even if you skip 6500 words in the middle.
So here's my theory: when you first publish you get all wrapped up in how good it is/isn't. After you've published a bunch of stuff, it mellow out considerably -- some stuff is better, some stuff is worse -- your ego is no longer hanging on any particular thing. It's sort of like the first time some one reads a 10 minute exercise, they insis on saying This is Terrible. But after a couple of years at it, they can just read. So it is with first published stuff. Hey, doesn't our title have something to do with that?
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile come to tea at 1:30 on Friday December 14, meet some of the other contributors, sign books. Bring friends & family