Very soon after the final rejection slip had been carefully filed away, Amazon self-publishing arrived! I asked my talented and creative daughter to design a front cover, I learned how to upload my file and voilá- my novel was out there!
But ... it really wasn't so easy! Seeing my book in digital form, I found loads of typos and formatting issues. I must have corrected and uploaded the book about a million times. Even now, I still find mistakes but I can't be bothered with the hassle of going back into the file and changing things. 
After the first enthusiastic flurry of friends and family who said it was great (?) nobody looks at it now. It's rather painful for me to read because it's full of memories and dead people. It's the proverbial first novel that everyone has in them. It needed to be written and then it needed to be discarded.
Like my first attempts at knitting, the few mis-shapen things that I made in the early days had to be unravelled and ripped out before I could pick up the used wool, start again and create something better the next time.
My first has been buried in an unmarked grave at midnight. :-D But there is one chapter in it I plan to use at some stage. My second was little better. I have just finished a huge rewrite on it - now virtually unrecognisable and thank God! I got it out a few years later and read it and thought to myself, 'So THAT@S why nobody wanted it!'
ReplyDeleteRevisiting early work can be painful but I do like your idea of reworking and re-using chapters - I never really thought of doing that! Silly really, thinking that I shouldn't meddle with my first book, but I could have a whole new novel just waiting to be reborn ( with a lot of surgery!!).
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