Post-flu notes
- Erin Fitzgerald
- Jan 11
- 2 min read
MOST IMPORTANT: Thank you to everyone who was involved with the Barrelhouse Imagine Cabins sessions, especially Stephanie King. That week was chaos for me, but they really helped me put this project on my plate.
One overall reread, one reread of the first section where I let myself write some notes.
The novel needs work, but what matters the most: it holds up enough overall to be interesting work.
I write to make sense of things. When I wrote the first draft, there was a Thing. Every time I've found it in the book now, I've cringed. It's obvious that in those scenes, I was trying to make sense of the Thing more than anything else. Since then, I've figured out the Thing. Just like I deserved better, so does the novel.
The ripple effect with this realization is a lot, and may even eventually need its own pass.
The good news: There'll now be room for new and genuinely interesting.
A start is a better WIP name: Grimoire.
Another way to retake ownership of Grimoire is to change some names.
The same day I realized this, I discovered that my main character's name (which I've always been ambivalent about for them) is also the name of the dog who was in the crate at Gene Hackman's house. And I saw it as ill fate when I'm not usually like that, so...
Even though Grimoire has an almost stereotypically fantasy setting and lore, it's very clear I wrote it in a different time -- not just personally but historically. Looking at TV, books, pop culture and other things from 2010-2016 corroborated this. (I'm considering that Actual Research, rather than Having the Flu.)
This realization doesn't have a direct ripple effect, but it does offer some possibilities for what could replace the boxes that are going out on the curb.
Little did I know: this is why I was more of a history major than a literature major.
PEN NERD ALERT: Best options for marking up a printed draft, imo? Zebra Mildliner or Zebra ClickArt. Colors range from traditional marker to highlighter. Easy to mark up text if you want. Easy to find and read notes later. Easy to yell at yourself or be kind to yourself. (I linked to JetPens, but I live in a fairly podunk town and have seen them locally. Also, Costco has them from time to time.)
New Year thinking has never worked for me, ever. That's why a great way to get the worse case of flu I've had in a decade, literally on December 31st, was to say to myself: "In ThE nEw YeAr I'm GoNnA wOrK oN a NoVeL."
