Dangerous Day Job

I’m working on two main projects right now, bouncing between editing my first draft of Oneiromancer and writing the first draft of an untitled work. I’m about ten chapters in to the new novel. Not too bad considering I took almost double the time to get to ten chapters the first time I started writing a novel. Editing the old stuff is going slow though. Some of these chapters are just … so bad. I find myself smacking my head going ‘who the hell wrote this crap?’ and then I immediately remember it was me. I wrote this crap. It’s hard to believe sometimes. At least the dissociation, while strange, helps me keep going. I think if I tried to do this immediately I would have had a breakdown or something. Waiting a couple months is definitely a necessary step, as I’m learning. Hopefully next time I have a completed draft it won’t be like this. The pacing is completely out of whack, all the characters do unnatural stuff that just reads weird, some of the lines in here make me cringe really hard. A lot of the techniques I picked up over time aren’t present in the early parts of the novel, obviously. I guess it isn’t too bad considering I wrote some of this over two years ago as a first attempt. I can only hope the rest of it will be at least a little bit improved.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley