{"id":1748,"date":"2010-03-17T02:06:17","date_gmt":"2010-03-17T06:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=1748"},"modified":"2010-03-17T02:06:17","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T06:06:17","slug":"chomping-at-the-bit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/chomping-at-the-bit\/","title":{"rendered":"Chomping at the bit"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s 1:30 am where I am, and I just finished reading through the second draft of Bringing Stella Home<\/em> and all of my first readers’ comments.\u00a0 I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling right now, but I am so<\/em> ready to make this story shine!<\/p>\n

First of all, the story itself is incredibly powerful, at least to me.\u00a0 True, the current draft is full of problems (some of them so embarrassing I cringe just to think that I allowed other people to read it) but at its core, there is definitely something poignant and moving.\u00a0 One of my first readers is on active duty right now in Afghanistan, and it actually inspired him to write a poem.<\/p>\n

Of course, a reader can be “moved” in bad ways as well as good, and some of the feedback on the current draft’s problems brought out a side of my friends that I didn’t know even existed (yes, Kindal, I’m talking about you).\u00a0 Seriously, reading those comments was like getting gutted and filleted with a rusty fishing knife.\u00a0 If I’d had problems with my self esteem, I probably would have cried.<\/p>\n

Oh well.\u00a0 At least it wasn’t boring. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

But harsh or not, the comments were all useful–surprisingly useful, actually.\u00a0 In a story this big, it’s easy to miss things (even big things like character motivations), but after reading through all my reader comments, I feel confident that I’ve got a solid outline for the revision.<\/p>\n

Some of the suggestions were pretty dang good, too.\u00a0 Usually, I only adopt about half (or less) of the proscriptive comments my readers give me, but this time, I’ll probably end up taking quite a few more.\u00a0 I don’t know if it’s because I was an idiot when I wrote the first draft or because my readers were getting into the story a lot more than usual, but the advice this time opened me up to all kinds of new ideas.<\/p>\n

I probably can’t say much more without spoiling my own story, and I definitely don’t want to do that.\u00a0 Let me just finish by saying that I believe this story may be the one that breaks me into publishing.\u00a0 I hope this doesn’t sound conceited or arrogant, because I don’t mean it that way at all.\u00a0 I just think that this story has some serious potential, and that if I treat it right, it will<\/em> end up in print someday.<\/p>\n

Inshallah, someday soon!<\/em><\/p>\n

In the meantime, I’m going to put everything into revising this next draft–that is, everything short of secluding myself in a white room and starving myself (or graduating and not looking for a job, which is a more realistic possibility).\u00a0 This story is calling to me–it needs to be told.\u00a0 It needs to be fixed.\u00a0 It needs to be polished and shared with other readers.<\/p>\n

It needs a lot of work.\u00a0 But now it’s 2:00 pm, and I’d better get to bed.\u00a0 Another exciting day of photocopying newspaper clippings and compiling spreadsheets of data on press freedom in Turkey awaits me.\u00a0 Excuse me if I sound too excited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s 1:30 am where I am, and I just finished reading through the second draft of Bringing Stella Home and all of my first readers’ comments.\u00a0 I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling right now, but I am so ready to make this story shine! First of all, the story itself is incredibly… Continue reading Chomping at the bit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68],"tags":[252,158,122,83,128,95,147,73,156,155,232,348],"class_list":["post-1748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","tag-criticism","tag-first-readers","tag-friends","tag-inspiration","tag-jakeson","tag-lack-of-sleep","tag-momentum","tag-planning","tag-revising","tag-rough-drafts","tag-why-we-write","tag-winep-internship-2010","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-sc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1748"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1758,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions\/1758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}