The Honeymoon

In which you get a glimpse into my writing process.

Today we are celebrating that I finished a first draft of the first chapter of the book that scares me. Yup. Wrote it longhand and fixed it and wrote it again and trashed it and wrote it again and typed it up and read it and hated it and decided to go back to teaching and waited two days, then re-read it and loved it and spell-checked it and sent it off to my critique group before I could change my mind. Nope, that is no exaggeration and yup, that's pretty much my writing process for everything. For the first draft. After that, it gets even messier.

The first chapter is always the fun part for me. Anything can happen. All my dreams for the book are still alive. There's still hope that it will be as earth-shatteringly brilliant on the paper as it is in my mind. The manuscript is not yet littered with notes like "fix this" and "argh! write this better!" I have all the time and patience in the world and I am the best writer ever.

I was riding so high today that I wrote a whole new picture book. In rhyme (that will change). I'll go back to the picture book whenever it finds me for the next month or so, like sneaking candy during the vegetable course. And I did it all in an hour, so I still had time to snuggle with Tink and listen to her giggle at old episodes of Tom and Jerry during Destructo's nap.

These are the days I have to remember on the other Viorst-ian days.