Late Saturday night I finally figured out how to email my books in a format I can open in iBooks on my phone. Who knows how in the world I never figured it out before, but I’m quite happy to know how to now. And when I say “quite happy” that means very extremely happy with a tad bit of thrilled-ness mixed in there.
I proceeded to immediately send and download When Life Hands You Lymes and Echoes. Seeing my WIPs (work in progress) actually looking like books was so deliciously beautiful and I’m still savoring the feeling. Look at them, sitting there in the library looking all professional and kinda-sorta like real published books.
Yesterday I began reading Echoes for the very first time ever. I wrote Echoes back during the first week of November for NaNoWriMo and didn’t allow myself to go back and re-read any of it during the writing process. After the book was finished I skimmed a little and found a few snippets for my blog, but other than that have not even opened the document since November 7th.
That means I had an entire book sitting there that had thousands of little parts that I had totally forgotten about. Plus, when I write in a rapid flurry of high word-count days, then sometimes I’m not too sure about the quality… But at the same time my brain sometimes works best when I just set aside almost everything else and take a running leap and immerse myself in the story. (During NaNoWriMo I wrote 50,000 words in 5 days, including one 20,000 word day.) That meant I was very eager to read Echoes for the first time.
In a very non-bragging way, I was quite pleasantly surprised yesterday when I started reading. Despite the many typos (some of which were so bad I’m not even sure what I was trying to say), an extreme amount of repeat words, several almost-funny plot holes, and various other problems, I really like the story.
After spending a good portion of the last 760 days working on When Life Hands You Lymes, I was rather amazed at how different Echoes was. From the cadence and rhythm and placement of words in the dialogue, to the descriptions of the world the story takes place in, to the main character’s love languages, it was all unique and beautifully, wonderfully different.
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What about you? Have you ever re-read something you’ve written and been utterly delighted? I think one reason I like Echoes so much is because I’ve actually been writing down ideas for the story and marinating it in my mind for around five years now. That’s a fair amount of time, I would say…
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Yay! It’s time for us to choose the country Annie will go to this week in our Friday Series, Around the World in Fifty-Two Weeks. And the destination is… Tibet! (Yikes!)
Noveltea 