HP Update

I've had some questions on where HP is at. How lovely! Thanks for asking.

This blog was meant to chart HP's progress, along with my thoughts on the struggles and victories found in writing my first novel. But it's turned into a more general "what's going on in mylife" blog. Especially because this has been such a frustrating and tumultuous year, it's been quite therapeutic blogging. Thank you blog! And thank you commentors! And more often than not, I find it difficult to talk about my progress on HP. I mean...I'm at the revising stage, so it's really the writing equivalent of cleaning out and organizing a closet, which is very time-consuming and involving for me but maybe not so interesting to other people. Earlier in the writing process would have been a better time to blog ~ that's when all the exciting stuff happens! But at that point blogging would also have been an unwanted distraction. So I've just been updating about HP when something interesting happens, rather than sharing what's been going on for the last month or two...which includes weeding out excessive "to be" construction, clarifying time shifts, questioning my overuse of adjectives, and other "house-keeping" (boring but necessary) tasks.

As for the blog itself, I'm finding that I'm not sure where I want to keep its focus. If I'll return to focusing primarily on writing/teaching/etc., or if I'll keep it focused on the general doings of my life. I need to think about that. The blog is 1-year old now, so perhaps it's a good time to decide what I really want it to be.

But to answer the questions about HP...I am working on it. Every week. In some cases every day. Never fear! Progress is being made. It won't be long before I'm trying to pawn copies off on people and begging for feedback. So, what IS happening?

Well, I thought the first 100 pages were totally finished. But then I read a printed version of those first 100 pages...and for some reason reading something in print is a very different experience than reading something from a computer screen. I tell my students that all the time. In fact, I go so for as forcing my students to bring actual printed copies of their drafts to their writing groups, and then read those drafts out loud to each other. And when meeting with students, we always start by reading part of their work out loud. The flaws usually become immediately apparent. I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps when seeing something on a computer, your mind goes on auto-pilot and compensates for problems...or at least makes them easier to deny ("hmm, that doesn't seem right but nobody will notice"). But on paper it's far easier to read something the way other people will read it. It's kind of like the difference between purposely looking at yourself in a mirror versus accidentally catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror. Know what I mean? So when revising this section on the computer, I was like "sure, that's good enough" and felt ready to move on. But by the time I finished reading it on paper, each page was covered with red ink, question marks, and frownie-faces.

Anyway. It needed some clean-up. Nothing creative or fun. Just proofreading. So that's what I'm doing now, and hope to finish today so I can finally move onto the middle part of the novel... which I've been talking about doing since last fall.

All this trouble will serve me well as an example next time I teach, when students suggest you can just read a paper over once and call it "revision."