Monday, January 30, 2006

Wish me luck

(How many times have I asked you to do this?)

I'm printing the novels I'm sending to the crime novel contest. It's weird to let go of these and not know what happens to them. I'm not so sure about the other, but it looks good. Still I keep making last-minute corrections and thinking about whether a particular scene should be done in some other way. Wait a minute, is that line bad there, should be there more vibe in that? Just let go, man, I keep telling myself. (I have to: the deadline is tomorrow.)

I haven't yet learnt just how one is able to decide what's good and what's not - if it's my own writing. (It seems to be easier in the non-fiction business, in which I've been much longer than writing and really trying to publish fiction.) Here's hoping.

By the way: I wrote the first draft of the other novel when I was still living with Ottilia's mother. I remember that I did some 30 or 40 pages at the same time when Ottilia was being born. We lived near the hospital and I ran back and forth to grab something to eat and everytime I sneaked to the computer and wrote page after page in a feverish rush. Ottilia's birth took 25 hours, if I remember correctly, and I think I got the story going pretty fast. It's been lying in the computer ever since. I dug it out and have been polishing it and rewriting bits. It looks good, dammit!

I had a laptop with me when Elina gave birth to Kauto. While waiting, I arranged the manuscript that will someday be the sequel to my original Pulpografia and wrote some bits of poetry (one of them got actually published later on).

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