Well, if you’re noodling around my blog today, you’ll notice a couple differences. Yeah, yeah, the header picture is brighter and cleaner, and I do like it. (Well, only in IE: Mozilla Firefox is a disaster and I don’t know how to fix the stupid thing or go to the newer theme.) And all those nifty thumbnails on the sidebars–the jpegs of my books and even that really nice Kirkus comment about DRAW–well, those are pfffttt!
That’s because I am a very dangerous person. I am the type of person who, sometimes, allows her impulse to make things that are already good even BETTER.
You know what I’m talking about: that extra touch here and there. If you’re a writer, you know the feeling, too. You’ve finished your book; you’ve spiffed and spat and polished. Maybe you’ve let the book sit a couple days; maybe you’ve gone the King-recommended six weeks (I could never go that long before looking at my first pass-through; then again, that could be one of the many reasons I’m not Stephen King–damn). Or, maybe, you’ve done as I always do: put the thing away for a couple days and then come back to do a read-through and start making what is okay a little bit better.
In the past, I used to endlessly rewrite. I mean, start at the bloody beginning a million times over and go through and go through and go through . . . until I wrote the life out of the thing. Dean Smith once told me–and a bunch of other writers–that we should NEVER try to FIX something. That is, rewriting a scene or editing–the polishing chores we all do to make our manuscripts not only presentable but, you know, GOOD–is not the same thing as trying to FIX something. I can’t remember exactly what Dean said, but I think the general idea is that if you’ve broken the damn thing already, if the story’s just not all that good, no amount of rewriting and fixing will make it better. Sort of along the lines of you can’t shine . . . well, you know. THAT stuff. Better to trash the whole thing and start over again.
This is good advice, actually. My forthcoming ASHES trilogy is a case in point. I wrote the original book about a year and a half ago. It was an okay book. At the time, I thought it was a VERY GOOD book. As it happened, no editors agreed with me. Roundabout December of last year, I took that sucker out again, reread it and CRINGED. Like, okay, interesting idea, crummy execution. It wasn’t ALL bad, but I saw the problems right away.
Now, I could have tried to FIX it–gone back in with the orignal viewpoint, etc.–and gone through the thing again. Would it have worked? I doubt it. Instead, I did a Dean-ism (and a Kris Rusch-ism): I killed that sucker. Put it away, didn’t look at it, redrafted the whole thing that, three months later, was ASHES. The rest is, well, history: I was happy with ASHES; my agent was happy; eventually, Egmont USA was happy.
In that case, I did not succumb to making something BETTER. I opted to make something completely different. I opted to start again.
How does this relate to my blog? Well, I have liked the design okay, but I haven’t been THRILLED. But I’ve been way too busy to make the time to change anything–until last night. Let’s put this into context: I’ve just finished my latest book; it’s sitting with my agent; yes, I’m anxious because it’s a weird little book that, yeah, *I* think is pretty darned interesting and leaves me a bunch of wiggle-room for the sequel, which I’m in the middle of drafting up right now for my agent. Now, I hate doing synopses because I keep taking them so LITERALLY. Like, I gotta do EVERYTHING I said I would, instead of remembering that a synopsis is a) just a summary and b) a way for an editor to chart a general direction/trajectory. Nothing is set in stone.
So I’m fussing and fussing yesterday, going through the story in my head, avoiding my computer, making tomato soup out of the gazillion pecks of tomatoes I have coming out of my ears (actually, the soup recipe is flexible, great and oh-so-different; you’d be amazed). I had put together a new compost bin on Friday; I was thinking, gosh, got to get some leaf mould and good garden dirt to start that sucker; I was looking at the new grill I ordered (an electric thing because my husband is deathly afraid that I’ll blow up the back of the house with a gas grill, and there’s no decent spot in the back for a firepit) and thinking: I got to put that sucker together. In short, I’m fixated on cobbling things together; I’m fixated on tearing down and putting the pieces in the right order. Heck, I even made the time to take a very nice ceramic pot that went to ground during our windstorm last week and Monster Glue that sucker.
So I’m in my Miss Fix-it mode; my Build-It mode. In some ways, this is all a necessary part of my process as a writer; I really am a great believer in symbolism and the power of the unconscious. But even a navel-gazing analyst needs to know when a cigar’s a cigar. When I started looking at my blog instead of dealing with the STORY that was in a MILLION PIECES in my addled brain, that should’ve tipped me off.
Did it? Uh, that would be no.
Instead, I played around with the blog. (Man, I went to a differnt server and messed around with installing a whole new blog, getting a new domain–those mandatory blog thingamabobs. But the HASSLE of importing one blog into another . . . my eyes merged in the middle of the my head.) So I tried to fix the blog I already got–my perfectly serviceable blog. Now I am not a computer idiot, but I”m no genius either. So when I thought I was merely downloading a theme to try out, I guess it just sorta blew past me that I was installing the stupid thing. Honest: With WordPress, you can download a bunch of themes and then preview what the blog will look like. (Honestly? I really like one that’s got a black-ish theme–it’s very restful but is only two columns and there’s no place for jpegs, etc. My webmaster is a very nice person, but he’s in college and I thought: well, I could ask if he can switch it over, but he’s busy; school just started; I don’t want to hassle the poor kid.) So, I thought: Heck, I’ll do it myself and just start with previewing the upgraded theme.
Oh boy, what an idiot.
Went to my site. Looked at the new picture. Thought: well, that’s not so bad–and then I noticed that all the flipping pictures were gone. My page link to my chain story was gone. EVERYTHING that was customized was GONE!!!
What an idiot. My evening disintegratred into little teeny, tiny pieces. I disintegrated into little teeny, tiny pieces. My long-suffering husband told me I was making mountains out of anthills. I flailed around for a while and then finally crawled into bed and lay there for a couple hours, telling myself what a doofus I am.
This morning, I’m still a doofus because I didn’t listen to my own advice which, really, is Dean’s advice and Kris’s advice, and the advice of most good writers: DON’T FIX THINGS. DON’T TRY TO MAKE THEM BETTER BY FIXING THEM. If things need fixing, then maybe that’s because it’s BROKEN to begin with and can’t be fixed.
Am I being clear? Maybe not. All I know is that I took something perfectly fine and I tried fixing it. I ended up breaking it. Dumb, dumb, diddly-doo dumb. I’ve ended up creating a huge hassle for my long-suffering webmaster; I’ve ended up somewhat sleepless and pissed-off at myself.
Anyway . . . I’m better. Sort of. At least, I see where I went wrong and when I shoulda stopped.
The bright side is, well, the new look is better. It’s still not the nicely atmospheric theme I liked–and maybe this is my subconscious telling me that I really wanted an excuse to trash the whole thing. Hmmm, that might be right.
Maybe time to send my webmaster another email . . .
PS: And on an entirely different note: When we were noodling around upstate NY a couple weeks ago, I met a very nice guy who runs a pretty interesting site for college kids. Check it out: More Than Grades, it’s called, and it’s filled with all sorts of useful links and services for high school kids doing the college admissions thing. Anyway, Mike asked if I would do an interview for a new blog on careers, and of course, I thought: Wow, another chance to bloviate . . . The interview’s up; go check it out and then go check out the rest of the site, if you’re so inclined.
