If you've been following along, you remember from my earlier blog, "Is there a draft in your closet?" that I am one of those writers who is guilty of the "out of sight, out of mind" type of revision. I would like to pretend that I never wrote such a bizarre novel, but in the spirit of openness and trust that blogging inspires (and the knowledge that even if you laugh I can't hear you), I will tell you how I described it at the time:
"It's a romantic suspense novel. It's first person, except for a few flashbacks to a supernatural horror scene, which are in the third person. Don't trust the main character. Come to think of it, all my characters are unreliable. Oh, and tell me who you think the murderer was, since I couldn't make up my mind, so I left it hanging. It's a really sad story, so I threw in lots of puns and jokes to liven it up."
Ouch. The miracle is that a few agents actually thought it was redeemable with work, but unfortunately, I had written myself into a corner, so instead of revising---into the closet it went and stayed for the next ten years. In short: Don't write anything that even remotely resembles that description. Next post, I'll list a few tried and true techniques so you can keep your closet for your shoes.
Extra credit: How many of the techniques that I warned you against yesterday did I mention in my description of my first novel?
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