While I was at Boskone last month I had the opportunity to sit down with my alpha readers for Mojo City. To my delight, they approved of the shape of the first draft, and their concerns about what would need to be fixed in the 2.0 release matched my own. They even, dare I say it, enjoyed reading it. And having spent a month away from the thing, I’ll be starting up that revision process sometime this week by sitting down and reading the 1.0 version for the first time since I closed it down. I’m looking forward to finding out what’s actually in it, as opposed to what I thought I put in it. And, of course, there will be lots of $PLACEHOLDERS to finally make specific — a series of walks through Chinatown and the Lower East Side are in my future — and characters who need to be made deeper and more believable. I think it’s going to be fun once I get into the groove, but I can feel an echo of the same resistance that kept me from starting the first draft: I don’t know all the answers yet, so how can I be sure it’ll be perfect? What if I screw it all up?
To which I say: Crikey, man. Pull on your big-boy writer pants and just start. You can fix anything you break in the 3.0 draft. Plus, hey! Here’s a video that will teach you how to do something you always kind of fake your way through, never the same way twice. It is, as the nice lady says, “one of the biggest challenges you’re going to face in your life.” And now that you can surmount that, how hard can finishing the damned book be?
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