Fact, Not Fiction, for the First Time in Years

The first person who can guess the song lyric reference in the post title gets a free hug (no Googling allowed!).

I promised myself that, upon my return from San Francisco, I would throw even more of my heart and my soul into my side projects, which means blogging here every day, reviving Too Shy to Stop (we already have three new articles scheduled for publication!), and tackling the revision process for “The Prescribed Burn”, my fiction manuscript.

The last thing on this list is probably the most difficult for me, but I am going help myself by taking advantage of two things I already do well: blogging and sharing via social media.

After some thought (not too much), I decided to make use of two domain names that I already own: LaryssaWrites.com and ThePrescribedBurn.com. I set both URLs to point to a WordPress blog where I am going to post revisions/additions of my manuscript, which is currently approx. 60,000 words in length.

Yeah.

I need to get serious about revising this thing. I have already gone through the whole manuscript twice: once because I had to make it decent enough to submit as my grad school thesis and again because I changed the perspective from third to first person. I have also added a lot of content since May 2009, when I graduated.

Though I feel the story is in the right place, I don’t really like the writing. The language and artfulness of the manuscript is not up to my personal standards; this was not a priority during my first few revisions because I wanted to get the structure right before I focused on the details.

On my new blog, which you can follow most weekdays (new content at 10 AM, just like with Comma ‘n Sentence), I will post very small chunks of the manuscript, revised with close attention to detail, language, and syntax.

In grad school, I would write “harder” because I knew that someone was always holding me accountable. Without that extra push, I have difficulty focusing on what I know I need to do. Dear readers, won’t you be my extra push?

I am completely aware that sharing my work in this way may change the way my completed manuscript will be received in the future, but I’m willing to take a risk; I feel the payoff will be much greater in the long run.

In an essay (read it – it’s good!) from The New York Review of Books about the future of book publishing, author Jason Epstein writes:

The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them.

I don’t know where this experiment will lead me, and I may terminate it if I feel that the results are detrimental to my creative process. For now, I remain positive and hope you will follow me on my journey to create a work of art. As always, your feedback and constructive criticism is more than welcome. Love.