TrinkaBean

My first draft is finished. As I sat pondering this most momentous moment, the above phrase leapt to mind—something the mister said on a regular basis before the little Brz’s made their appearance and purged his language for underage consumption. I’m told this means something along the lines of, ‘That brilliant orb shineth all the more brightly in contrast with the ugliness thereabout.’ Only in the case of this first draft, I’m thinking more, ‘Your first draft reeks like a goat’s backside but dig around long enough, you might find something worth salvaging.’ The problem came at 46,000 words. As everyone knows, 46K does not a first draft make. For days, I tried to lengthen the silly thing to a suitable, novel-ish size. After printing out, reading, rereading, whining and reading (and vice versa), I plucked another 1000 extraneous words from space and sprinkled them around at random. They were icky and now they’re banished for all eternity. And then I realized the whole thing needed replotting and rewriting anyway, so let’s call it good and move on. The Fiction Police will not show up and throw me in writer’s prison for giving birth to an underweight first draft. (And if they will, just let me wallow awhile in my delusional state.) So it’s ugly, it’s beautiful and it’s done. The glimmers of a great read are in there just begging to move forward and be released from the bondage of crummy grammar and overused M-dashes. It’s not the story I want to tell—not yet. But there’s a glimmer in there somewhere.