Here is what I love, love, love about being a writer:
When you’re a writer, eventually you get to meet other writers, and eventually they show you their work, and a lot of it is pretty good, and some of it is awful but you can tell them how to fix it, and some of it is really fairly inspired and clean but you try to help them make it better anyway—
But then every now and then somebody gives you something SO INCREDIBLY MINDBREAKINGLY WONDERFUL that you just feel grateful.
Grateful that you have been given the chance to read it.
Grateful that you are so caught up in a story that you can’t wait to see what happens next, because the characters and the setting and the situation has become entirely real to you, even as the utterly gorgeously ridiculously snarky fictionality of the thing is always right before you.
Grateful, and humbled, to see such skill at work.
Grateful and excited at the prospect of being able to say, a year or two or three down the road, “Yes, *I* read it in manuscript form.”
I am talking about a book that will no doubt get a new title even before it is queried (though its current title is perfect). It’s a crazy funny voice-y mad romp through a traditional fantasy world…with nothing traditional about it. (Unless you count the…nah, not even that.) C.S. Inman, you rock. I’m doing the best I can to mark it up, which amounts to noting a typo every hundred pages or so. Really, I’m just enjoying the ride.
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Oh but I mentioned progress. Yes that too. I hacked and slashed my way through chapters 16 and 17 of NCM–three to go! 36 pages! God, it’s so close I can taste it. I’ve cut thousands more words, and there’s more to be cut….I will be done by the weekend, and with such relief I cannot even tell you.