Once More Unto the Dragon, Still Wielding My Trusty Butterknife

I haven't liked to post about it, but will keep this short and less-painful.  In this past week, Carole Blake has finally sent me my rejection (I didn't expect otherwise, but hormones still make it deflating), and James River Writers' letter came, 'congratulations, you didn't win this.'  Again, hardly a shock (JRW has never much featured my kind of fiction; it took like six years to even get a first page read, between all the Southern fiction and writers writing writerly-ly about being writers), but again, not feeling good about it.  I think the latter bugged me mainly for its patent expectation I'd rewrite.

Taking advice does not come hard for me in my work.  The problem is - I'm out of readers.  The two I want to trust most have full lives, and writing of their own - and taking on a 130k word manuscript of someone else's is too much a demand on their time.  Mr. X, who's always been one of my best readers, abdicated the position some time ago because he somewhat unnecessarily recoiled in a moment when I explained the market inadvisability of preserving some passages he happened to like.

It is what it is, but it was thus I spent six months of before my last real go at revisions flailing and not knowing where to stab that butterknife at the dragon which was the MSS.  I finally tackled it, essentially alone, and felt I'd done a lot of good with it.

Not surprisingly, even to *my* vanity:  clearly I haven't done enough good.  Not that JRW is the last word in a genre they don't prefer, obviously - but even dipping back into it myself, I know I can do better. Must do.

And it is completely exhausting.  Not exasperating.  But I want Mr. X back, or to have the capacity to trust. It's not lost on me that you can find readers online, but the one way I am "precious" about my writing is in that making a reader of a stranger is almost giddily horrifying to me.  It's not the sharing of my work - it's the trusting to the competence of someone I don't know to know how to follow the path to where I want to go.  The idea is nearly offensive in its alienness to my way of working.

Though to be sure I never was a joiner - and went on to become a First Chapter member of JRW - and actually a founder of the SBC ... still, for me, reaching out for help to someone anonymous to me is beyond my capability.

And so I read (again) and so I see, cold now, the words I once could not see for the forest, or whatever it is the kids say these days.  And so I wield my trusty butterknife.

And stare into the cold eyes of the dragon again.