It is with great sadness that I announce the demise of Widow Woman, at least in her current incarnation. She succumbed at 9:12 this morning after a long illness, in spite of the heroic and tender care she received at the hands of her long-suffering caretaker (who, in a bizarre twist of fate, was also her executioner.)  In lieu of flowers, please send memorials to Writers Anonymous. Or directly to me. I’ll probably need them.

What’s up, you might be asking? Well, here it is: For more than a year now, I’ve been toiling to get this monster of a book off the ground. Twice, I got to the point where I thought it was finally finished and began sending it out. But I must confess that, all along (if I’m honest with myself), I felt deep in the pit of my stomach that there were things about that manuscript that just weren’t working as it was conceived. (And clearly, the agents I queried agreed.)

It’s never easy to look at something you’ve worked so hard to create and admit that it’s crap, but that’s just what I had to do. It was time to put the old girl out of her misery, so this morning, I killed her. She’s dead. (Secret: It was kind of liberating.)

Now even though she’s dead, I’m not actually giving up on her. I still believe in the story, and I think it’s got the foundation to build something really fantastic with it. Even though killing it was relatively easy, there’s no way I was going to bury it.

So what did I do? I got a couple of good writing books, talked through various plot difficulties with a couple of very trusted readers, and wrote, wrote, wrote. I ate, drank, and slept on it for a few weeks now, and the good news is, I think I finally know where I want to go with it.

Of course, wherever there is good news, there is usually bad news stepping on its heels, and this case is no different. The bad news is that the changes I’m making will necessitate what will, in effect, be a complete reworking of the entire manuscript. This isn’t just dropping a chapter or aborting a single character I’m talking about–this is a rewrite on what will be a Bionic Woman-type scale. This will take some time, for sure.

They always say that novel-writing ain’t for the faint of heart, and it’s true, but I think this will be very much worth the effort, because this morning, after days of plot/character development, backstory imaginings, and armed with a notebook full of notes, I finally got started on the resurrection.

Whoo! It went like gangbusters! After months of feeling like I was sort of fumbling around in the dark, I feel like the lights finally turned on, and not only on, but blazing. My only problem today was stopping, because…

there is now, of course, this little timing issue, in that my kids are home from school for the summer now, which will make it harder to find guilt-free writing time, but somehow, it’ll get done. I’ve set myself a goal for the end of the summer for the rewrite–I will keep you posted on how it goes. At least I know that my children are old enough to know now that this is what Mom does: She’s a writer, and writers write. Boom. End of story. (Or at least, it will be, I hope, by the end of the summer.)

So–that’s the latest. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.