Hi. Yeah. It’s me. I guess I’m back. At least, I mean to be back. I’ve missed you. Does that count for something? Surely it must. (Though, dear ones, I’m on Twitter pretty much every day because it’s so much easier to find a few moments to talk to folks in 140-character bites while chasing after two kids. So if you’ve REALLY missed me you can always find me there.)

Meta Pole. Random photo because it pleases me. Though it pleased me so much more in person.

What’s finally gotten me off my ass to talk to you again? I wanted to say something on Twitter today and just couldn’t do it without spreading it out across ten tweets or more. At which point I realized that…Oh yeah. That’s what I used to use the blog for, right? To talk to people for more than 140 characters at a time? And I recalled that I liked it. I liked it quite a bit. And here I am. Are you still here?

What I wanted to talk about: process and the new novel. As you may recall from about three posts and three months ago, I had put the new novel (aka Novel Numbah Three, aka Cold Black Stars) on the back burner to finish revisions on The Revolution of Every Day and was finally able to pick it up again at the end of October. At that point it had been sitting for so long, and with only one thin little chapter to it, that the only way to pick it back up was to begin again. So at the end of October I did just that.

It took a year to write the first draft of my first novel, Drowning Practice (may it sleep comfortably in my former agent’s drawer. Yes, I said former agent. Yes, there’s a story behind that. Today is not the day for that story. Suffice it to say I still love her and she still loves me and we have parted on the most amicable of terms possible). I wrote that one while I was getting my MFA and the poor thing got workshopped nearly to death. In fact, I think it might not have been relegated to the drawer had it not been dragged through workshops before I even knew what it was really about and what it wanted to be. (Maybe someday I’ll pick it back up and try to find those shards worth keeping but it feels like something a stranger wrote, some thirty-year-old girl in Brooklyn with pink hair and no kids and a drafty old crumbling house.) I learned a lot about my revision process from writing that book, but perhaps not so much about my first-draft process, because of those workshops. I did, however, learn an invaluable lesson–one of the most important things I drew from that MFA experience: I never, ever, ever show a single word of anything to anyone when it’s in first draft. Maybe I’ll show second draft to my most trusted draft readers. Usually, though, I keep it to myself until third draft. It’s just too dangerous for me to have someone else’s ideas on a book or story before I truly understand where it’s going myself. I’m highly suggestible, I suppose. Because I was workshopping that novel as I wrote it, large parts of it got worked over and rewritten and reimagined several times before the book even had an end. I don’t recommend that, at least I don’t recommend it to myself anymore.

Everything was different with The Revolution of Every Day. I started it on the first day of a month-long residency at Ragdale in the fall of 2005 (oh the luxury of being a childless writer! I won’t see the inside of an artists’ colony for another ten years or so because I’m not the sort who likes to be away from her kids). I kept it to myself and worked steadily for that month and several months after, but by then I was working with my agent and there were more revisions to be done on Drowning Practice before it went out to publishers. I was pregnant with the kiddo and it was important to get the revisions nailed down before he was born because she and I both knew not much work would get done after his birth for a good long time. Revolution was set aside.

(By the way, if you can ever arrange to be pregnant at an artists’ colony, do so. Naps whenever you want them and someone else cooking your dinners.)

And then Kiddo was born. I didn’t write a word of fiction until he was about eighteen months old. Yes, that hurt. It hurt a lot. He’s worth it.

I have no idea how long it would have taken me to write that first draft of Revolution if Kiddo’s arrival hadn’t been a factor. It took six years to write eight drafts, but I don’t remember exactly when I finished that first draft. I know it was more than a year. And I know that I didn’t write it straight through from beginning to end. I did a lot of backtracking as I went. I reached the hundred-page point and went back and did a major rewrite of that whole first third. I did that a few more times as I worked my way toward the end. Only the final third fell out all in one piece, but that’s how the endings tend to come if you’ve taken the right path to get there.

Rachael and I talk craft a lot, and I find her process fascinating because it’s so different from what I’d done with the first two books and with my short fiction. She writes her first drafts incredibly quickly. She’s a firm believer in the Shitty First Draft. Now, I write a loose first draft, too, and I always write blind–I’m not an outliner by any means–but there’s always been that backtracking and tinkering. I’ve never started at the beginning and plowed straight on to the end, giving myself permission to write badly along the way, with the understanding that that’s what revisions are for.

Mind you, Rachael hates writing first drafts and loves to revise. I love first drafts and only tolerate revising because it’s necessary. I think she writes her first drafts that way because she’d rather get it over with as quickly as possible. But you know what? She gets results. She gets those first drafts done, and then digs in and gets her revisions done and has some damn fine books to show for it. (Especially one that hasn’t been published yet that is going to fucking blow you away when it comes out. No, it’s not a romance. Yes, it’s fiction. It’s… It’s amazing. Just you wait.)

With this third book, I decided I wanted to try something new. This was going to be the Do What Rachael Does novel. I decided I would write the first draft in three months. I would not backtrack. I would write fast and loose and let things fall where they fell and just trust that if I could just get it down I can fix and tweak and reshape in subsequent drafts. Because what the hell? I’m only thirty-eight. This is only my third novel. I’m too young and too new at this to be claiming a process set in stone–especially when the experiences of the first two books were determined by grad school and new motherhood.

I was dubious. I was afraid I was going to waste my time and spend all the juice of this story on a clumsy cluttered nonsensical mess of a draft that would be too far gone to revise into anything worth keeping. But I did it anyway. You know what? It’s been amazing. Working that fast all kinds of wonderful surprises are cropping up, all kinds of connections clicking into place as I go. It’s been so much easier to get out of my own way moving this quickly. I’m 70k words into the first draft, and it feels like its only got another 10 or 20k left in it. I’m aiming for a finished draft on my arbitrary deadline of February 20th, my half birthday. Yes, that will be a somewhat short manuscript, but I do seem to be consistent so far in writing very short first drafts and then expanding and layering in revisions.

And with this little girl getting older and more independent all the time, it won’t take me six years to get to a final draft on this book.

I’m hoping I’ll have a draft ready to send to readers by summer. We’ll see, though. It’s all new territory. But a first draft in three months! So fucking exciting.