No crying for me. I finished Surrealist! After almost five months working on this draft, it’s finished. What’s more, I think it actually doesn’t suck. A miracle in the highest order.
I know there have been many updates about Surrealist, and I am very excited to move on to another project for mine and your sake. However, I doubt I will be away from Surrealist for very long. It will come back up in revisions before anyone is ready for it.
Progress
I drafted about 21.5k words this month. It is by no means the highest word count, but at least I finished Surrealist. The ending five or six chapters flew by, though, so the bulk of that wordcount came later in the month.
A strange thing that happened after finishing this manuscript is that I felt a cloud lift from above me that I hadn’t even realized was there. Surrealist was such a complicated book that I believe it was taking up more of my subconscious than I even realized. It was exhausting me without me even knowing.
Liesure
My leisure time has been lacking this month. I did finish watching Wednesday, which I thought was a bit fragmented but had some good moments.
As for books, I find that I bounce around books far too much. It is difficult for me to properly sink into any of them, and the bar a book has to clear in the first couple of pages is high. Being a critic of my own work makes me harsh on everything.
I did read The Hunger Games as a part of teen book club, and between that and Twilight, I’m happy to say that they both still hold up now. I am not surprised at their popularity. With The Hunger Games in particular, I felt like I was right back reading it for the first time and experiencing all the feelings of each at every twist and emotional moment.
What I’m Learning
Surrealist is the type of book I like to write. That may seem silly as I’ve already written it, but I didn’t really know until it was done.
I’ve written all manner of things, but I’ve primarily written towards the more commercial side of the spectrum. Surrealist is very much towards the literary and will move further in that direction as I revise it. It is high concept, very strange, struggling with tough topics, and deep ideas, while also focusing particularly on language. This is a far harder thing to write; however, I find that I really enjoy it and like any new thing, it takes time to master.
I will say that it is making me want to read more in the vein of this literary, weird kind of book I like. I know I love Piranesi and that is part of why I wrote Surrealist in the first place, but I really should read the Murakami books that have been on my shelf for far too long waiting for me to crack them open and I’m currently on the hunt to find more surrealist, literary science fiction books to see what has already been done and how. I need to learn from what is out there and to know what isn’t.
I do believe this means that my next project will be significantly more surrealist, literary, and strange. Even if I go back and rewrite Cut Throat next, it will be a far weirder book than it would have been, and who knows, maybe that is why it wasn’t working before. It was deficient on the weird quotient. I don’t think Cut Throat will ever be wholly literary, but it could very well move to be more upmarket.
Looking Forward
I am moving on to Project C. My goal is to finish it in a month or two. I have a trip planned next month where I will not be taking my laptop, so the plan is to actually relax, though I will have a notebook so I might write a short story or two while I travel.
Looking at my timeline for Surrealist, I will start working on revisions for that as soon as the first draft of Project C is over. I will likely do multiple passes of Surrealist, one for overarching big issues and a second one for a line-level edit, but I haven’t decided yet whether I will send it to my writing group again in between those two drafts or do both first before sending it to them.
Once I’ve finished those drafts and second-round critiques, the book will go off to my beta readers. I hope this project won’t take too long, but my writing group is a little concerned because they know I despise revision, and this is going to be a particularly difficult one.
In the near future, I will be working hard on Project C. If I can hit 2k a day on that project starting next week, that would be ideal. In the distant future, I am back into Surrealist, and though it has been an absolute slog to get through the first draft, I actually think the revision is going to be quite interesting.
Naomi (27 years old, no money, no prospects, a burden to my family, frightened)
