For the next several weeks I’ll be engaged in rewriting a novel, one I thought I’d finished with a few years back. One of the frustrating things about this art is that often you cannot see a problem with a piece of work right away. It sometimes takes months to realize what is wrong, occasionally years. You work your butt off to make it as right as possible and then, a few years and half a dozen rejections later, you read it again and there, in the middle of it (sometimes at the beginning, once in a while at the end) is a great big ugly mess that you thought was so clever when you originally wrote it. You ask yourself, “Why didn’t I see that right away?” There is no answer, really. It looked okay at the time (like that piece of art you bought at the rummage sale and hung up so proud of your lucky find, but that just gets duller and uglier as time goes on till you finally take it down with a sour “what was I thinking?”) and you thought it worked, but now…
This is what editors are for. This is what a good agent is supposed to do. This is the value of another set of eyes.
Anyway, that’s what I’ll be doing. And I have the time because last week I “retired” from the board of directors of the Missouri Center for the Book. I served for nine years, five of them as president. Per the by-laws, after nine years a board member must leave for a time. This is vital, I think, because burn-out is like that manuscript you thought was so perfect—sometimes it take someone else to notice that everything’s not up to par.
During my tenure as president, a few changes were made, Missouri got a state poet laureate with the MCB as the managing organization, and a cadre of new board members revitalized the whole thing. Look for some good programs to come out of them in the next few years.
What I find so personally amazing is the fact that I got to do this. I mean, be president of essentially a state organization. Small budget, sure, but it is connected to the Library of Congress and we do deal with the governor’s office and what we do has relevance for the whole state. I started out doing programming for them and for some reason they thought I should be in charge. Well, that’s a story for another time. Suffice to say, I have no qualifications (on paper) for that position. None. The first year I got the job I characterized my management approach as throwing spaghetti. Something was bound to stick.
It was an education. And I got to work with some very talented people and made some friends who are inestimable. My horizons were expanded and I was able to play in a sandbox of remarkable potential.
The timing couldn’t be better, though. I have this novel to rewrite and, as it is the first part of a projected trilogy, I thought I’d go ahead and finish the second book after I fix the first one. Yes, there are things in the offing which I shan’t discuss right now—as soon as I know anything concrete, you will, should you be reading this—and Donna has graciously cut me another several months’ slack to get this done. She is priceless.
Meantime, I may be posting here a bit less. Not much. But a bit.
Stay tuned.
