Lately I've been thinking about the second book I wrote. (The first one is thankfully no longer accessible.) It was the first book of a trilogy, overlong and probably overwritten. But the characters and the world still call me. I need to upload the book to Kindle and reread it to see if the story is as appealing as I remember it being.
I also rediscovered an old short story of mine and posted it to the writing workshop I belong to for critique. The comments I've received make me wonder if I need to dig more deeply into the POV character and change his voice, or if I should switch the POV from 1st person to 3rd. But this story, as well as the novel, are definitely not Amazon-ready!
Do you ever look at some of your early projects and try to resurrect them? Have you been successful?
I have one that I just absolutely refuse to look though. I...it just...no.
ReplyDeleteNone of my early work is worth salvaging. But some of those ideas trickle into new works.
ReplyDeleteI really want to, but I start to read and want to gouge my eyes out. At least it was good exercise, right? Maybe I'll rewrite them in the future, but it will be from scratch.
ReplyDeleteAbout two or three years ago, I found a bunch of short stories I'd written back in the 1990s, all literary shorts. I re-read them and had my wife type them up for me (because she's faster at typing) and published them as my collection "Just Exactly How Life Looks." I liked them as much 15 years later as I had back when I wrote them, and made only a few stylistic changes.
ReplyDeleteRight now, I'm going through and editing a novel I wrote over the course of 2 years back in 2006 and 2007, and then set aside for two years, too.
I'd like to find stuff I wrote back in the 1980s as a kid; I wonder if I was as good as I thought I was. (I doubt it.)
The nice thing is, if you can salvage something out of it, you can so easily publish it on a Kindle and find at least SOME readers. I never recommend just throwing junk out there, but things that I write and think "I probably can't sell this to a publisher" (like short stories I wrote in college) can be edited and put out there and people will read them. So you might want to rescue that first-in-the-series trilogy.
It's amazing how much our early works make us cringe, isn't it? At least that's a sign we've improved as writers.
ReplyDeleteBriane, yes, I hope to put this on Amazon eventually. So many projects, so little time...