My wife said something interesting last night.
I am now in final edits for Indian Summer--meaning basically just rereading to check final formatting for the ebook versions--but as I'm going through, I'm once in a while finding sentences that I don't quite love. The problem is that I know why I wrote them. One is intentionally unnecessary, but I have kept it because it reflects something about the character of the narrator at that point in time. Another serves as an action transition. Another.... Well, the bottom line is that I'm keeping some sentences that I don't think are top quality, but because they have other importance.
This is where we get to what my wife said.
When I told her about one of these sentences, which I'm keeping despite it being just a little bit "off," she said "You will always be embarrassed by your first novel."
I want to write that one down again for truth:
"You will always be embarrassed by your first novel."
No matter what, that first attempt, that first time you stick your neck out there and do something new, will be a bittersweet moment. This is what my wife was saying. No matter how good the first book is, no matter whether it gets critical acclaim from every source from here to Estonia, I as an author will always be supercritical and somewhat weary of that first shot.
And when I say "I," I mean every author. In fact, I mean every author in every way. I mean, every author of any moment. If you've ever done something for the first time, I mean you.
It's like your first kiss. Or first sex. Or the first time you performed on stage. Or any first. I don't care how great it was; in your mind, the great is always tempered by the newness of the thing, the naivete of the thing's doer, the greenness.
The important thing, though, is that we do that thing. The "first," while there may be a few points of embarrassment, is also the one that will always stick to the mind with all the exciting trappings of nostalgia.
I'll be excited--and very proud--to introduce Indian Summer to the world in July. It's a fun book, and I think many of you will like it. Hopefully a lot. And you probably won't even notice that the third sentence on page 57 is one that the writer grimaces at.
And you shouldn't. The good thing about the Curse of the First Novel is that it only applies to the author, not the reader.
