Sunday, December 09, 2007

Driving myself crazy

I'm sure other authors do this, too. At least, I like to believe they do. I wrote a perfectly decent first chapter to my WIP. Then by chance an agent asked me to send a chapter or so to her. From our communication, I have to believe that she understands this is not complete, that I'm still working on it--that's what WIP means to everyone, right?

Now, this agent is one of my TOP choices. I do NOT want tot blow this with her. I want to send her the very, very best first chapter I can possibly produce. (A little aside: The first partial she requested from me had a grammatical error in it that happens to be one of her pet peeves. I don't want to screw this up -- again.) So, I started second guessing it. I decided it didn't start with enough action. Actually, I decided the whole thing sucked. Anyway, I rewrote it. Moved scenes around. Did more second guessing. Then I sent it to my writing buddy, Jeff. Jeff is incredible, but more about him later. He read them both and chose the first one. Hands down. Then told me to trust my gut.

He's so right.

So, now I'm working on the second chapter. And I'm second guessing myself again. Maybe I'll just send the first chapter to the agent and the second one to Jeff. I hope he's got a lot of spare time right now.

3 comments:

Spy Scribbler said...

You know, I used to think I'd manage to be a writer who wasn't neurotic. I finally realized: writing is a neurotic activity. It's impossible to not be neurotic!

Good luck with the agent quest!

Liz Wolfe said...

You're probably right *sigh*. Best to acknowledge it and deal with it rather than pretending we can change it.

Anonymous said...

You're better than you think you are!

your favorite sister