Shocked & Stunned

Cardiffella cover draft, courtesy of my personal illustrator (and all round fabulous friend), Ana

 

 

 

 

 

 So, fifteen months after I wrote the darn thing, today I finally read the entire manuscript for Cardiffella. And do you know what? It's not bad. I'd even go as far as saying that it's actually quite good. It's certainly a lot better than what I remembered. Don't get me wrong, I knew it wasn't complete tripe because I've had several people read it (including one family member), and everyone gave me positive feedback, but I'd put off reading it through because I was worried that I would find it completely un-fixable. Oh, it needs work, obviously, but it definitely wasn't a complete waste of a month writing it.

I managed to correct most of the typing and spelling errors (I would say all of them, but I know I will have missed some), and I altered a few mistakes that I made with character names and what not. The biggest job is adding the extra ten thousand words that it needs in order to be long enough for submitting to a publisher. I wrote a prologue last year which sits at just under two thousand words, but those other eight thousand or so need to be incorporated into the main body of text, and that's going to be tricky.

Oh, I can see areas that need a little elaboration, sure, but the problem that I have is that I actually really like large sections of it, and don't want to mess with it too much. I figure this is the bane of any writer who is going through the awful burden of editing their work. Despite putting off reading and editing it, I am really attached to my modern little fairy tale, and am fighting the Editing Monster with all my might.

One thing that I am determined not to change are the pussy jokes. Okay, I may have overdone them slightly (er, probably more than slightly), but with one of my primary characters being a talking cat, that was always going to be the case anyway.

Actually, there are two things that I won't change. My main character, Ella, spends a good deal of her time cursing, and usually that's not the norm for a chick lit novel. But my modern day Cinderella needs to swear, it's part of who she is, and quite frankly the story would lose a lot of its humour if I took out the cursing.

So as I go through it again in a more severe editing round, my copious pussy jokes and wide selection of curses will definitely be safe from that pesky backspace button. *nods*