I only had 15 mins to bash in the above without thought or pause but~I DID EXACTLY WHAT WALTER MOSLEY SAID in his guide, having written my first draft three years ago. I had assumed it was rubbish because every time I opened a page my eye seemed to fall on something trite or stilted. The fact that it was in my own handwriting was also very offputting.
Then I forced myself actually to sit down and begin reading from chapter two. (Not chapter one because I spent so long hacking it about I know it by heart.) And was shocked. The prose was not bland. The characters sprang out. The dialogue was quite good. So my ideas of scrapping the whole thing and writing another draft in parallel without reference to the first goes out the window.
I'm not someone who believes in redoing anything for the sake of it. So I think what I'm going to have to do is just keep the good bits and weave in the new stuff around that. Gwendolina, the hellhound who lies in a corner chewing a baby doll's face and snarling, for example, features nowhere at all. So I gotta put her in. I said I wanted a horrible dog in my story so in she goes!
So onwards and upwards and all that. And I've got to rush again as the computer's faulted and I'm getting chucked off in three minutes.
Illustrated: Agatha Christie, who sold two billion books ~ one billion in English, yet died leaving about £170,000 ~ under £2,000,000 in today's money. That's bad business sense for you!
