warning: cranky post follows

Got an e-mail from agent checking on progress with the WIP. Since I should have had this bloody ms done six months ago, I set everything else aside* to clean up the end of that first 100 pages to send in for feedback. I need feedback because I'm worried about it. And indeed, the more I read it over and worked on it yesterday, the more I was struck by the fact that this ms really sucks. The whole thing. It's like the Frankenstein's monster of mss--nobody will be able to stand to even look at its scarred and stitched-together face. The pacing is a mess, like two or three different writers wrote the same story using the same characters, then tore their work up and pasted the pieces on top of each other. It's too dark, too slow, it's uneven and weird and just plain embarrassing.

So I meant to send it in yesterday, but it's such a mess I am still trying to clean it up to where reading it won't be deadly torture. If I work all day, and I'm very lucky, I will have it done by late tonight--and it's still going to s*ck when I'm done. No question about that: it's still going to suck. The crappiness of it is so deeply interwoven that it can't possibly be decrapped.

However, in the writing biz, you always have to be up for severe humiliation. I said I'm going to send it in--so I'm gonna. This unfortunately puts my agent in the unenviable position of having to think of something to say about the ms and its progress--but hey, what can you do?

And so, to work, with hopelessness and grim determination.




*If you are a person to whom I owe something from the pile on my desk, sorry. It's coming, it's coming.