My Caterpillar
Just this Saturday, I reached a huge milestone.
I finished the first draft of the novel that I started almost two decades ago. I can't believe that I have finally told the whole story!
And interestingly, since then I've been struggling with a weird sort of grief.
It boils down to this: I've created a wonderful, fat, adorable caterpillar, of which I'm very fond. And now the caterpillar has to turn into a butterfly, which will involve some painful transformation.
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| hello, world, I'm new here! |
And I don't know what the butterfly will look like, and if I'll love it as much as I love the caterpillar... and the fact is that at the end of the process, it will have changed and become something else.
No one else will ever really, truly understand what that caterpillar means to me... all the blood, sweat, and tears— and just me— that I poured into it.
And part of me is afraid that when the process is complete and the caterpillar has morphed and flown away, I'll have lost something important to me.
I feel like I have run, as L put it, "a 14-year marathon." I don't really know why he picked the number 14, because it's more like 19, start to finish; but then, it isn't at all, because I've had extended periods in my life when I've shelved the whole thing. I started it before L was born, and then motherhood took over. And then once or twice over the years I've gotten inspired and dusted out the WIP (Work In Progress, for those of you who aren't hobbyists of some kind) and gone through a period of really trying to move it along.
And then some other portion of life/motherhood took over, and I shelved it again. Until about 6 months ago.
In fact, I've run more than half of that marathon in the last 6 months. When I opened up my previous draft last October, I had 184k words. (That's already bigger than most published books. More on this later.) By the end of 2020, I had 218k words. Two weeks into 2021, I already had 230.5k. The final word count? Um, I'm kind of embarrassed to tell you.
Sigh. OK, it's a little over 400k. That's an increase of 216k words, plus editing of the prior content.
L is really my muse, when it comes down to it. The two times I've been able to make serious progress on this project have been tied to phases he was going through, which inspired me. I can't expound any more than that, because it involves things very personal to him. But he created the wave for me, and I rode it. (That will definitely go in the acknowledgments of the published book.)
So thanks again, L, for the inspiration—and also for doing me the huge favor of reading through the manuscript and giving me savvy advice. Your multi-layered perspective as an experienced reader, a young male, and an intellectual are all invaluable to me as a writer.
Also, while we are still on the acknowledgments page, P has been absolutely essential to this process as well. He's got a pretty savvy head on his shoulders, under that hip boy-band haircut (I just lost 99% of my credibility with him by using the word "hip" in this sentence, not to mention linking his hair to adolescent rock stars; shh, don't tell him). I suspect the phenomenal amount of time he has spent playing EU IV and its variants has a lot to do with this, but he has turned out to be quite the consultant for me on military strategies and political intrigues, not to mention geographical considerations, as well as questions involving plain old common sense.
If you had told me, 19-ish years ago when I first dreamed up the idea for this story, that one day my 16/17yo firstborn would inspire me to finally DO THIS thing, and that my 14/15yo second-born would turn out to be my best sounding board, you'd have been scraping my jaw off the floor.
And then there's E. May every writer have at least one fan to hang on their every word as devotedly as my 10yo daughter has mine. Actually, she and my 90-year-old grandmother have both spent the last 6 months scarfing up each chapter in serial format as fast as I have produced them, and their gratifying response is always the instant cry: "Is there more, yet?"
E is very nearly as attached to this caterpillar as I am. She has laughed out loud. She has sobbed—sometimes even for the right reasons, although I've had to talk her off a ledge a couple of times when she misunderstood where the writer was taking her. Spoiler alert: This is not one of those stories where the characters lay everything on the line and then lose. It has a very satisfying ending. Just ask E, who literally sobbed for joy at the end. (She says she was crying, not sobbing. But I was watching her, and I think the more descriptive word is accurate.)
And also, I think some of those tears were because it's over now, and I will never again hand her the next installment of the tale.
In fact, E is so attached to the caterpillar, I'm not sure she really understands why it can't just go crawling out into the wide world as is. While she was waiting for the next installments, she spent a lot of her time rereading (and rerereading) the previous chapters. She has journeyed with my heroine every step of the way, and although I did not write it specifically for children, it's the kind of book that has transformed her childhood, shaping her profoundly as she grew along with it; and she will find she gets even more out of it when her more mature self returns to it in the future.
But back to explaining my strange grief. I'm being irrational and unreasonable, and I know it full well, but that's grief for you. You can't control it, you can only choose to face it—or else suppress it, and it will come back to haunt you later. So I'm trying to let myself go all the way down, so I can come back up again (can we come back up again, already?).
I will always have the caterpillar, in a way. I have the complete draft published into a littlehuge eBook, with the subtitle "r1c," meaning Revision 1 Complete. I can keep it forever, so I can admire my characters' journey as I originally described it.
But the caterpillar in a jar is just a conversation piece, or a top-of-the-bedroom-dresser decor item. It was never meant to be just a caterpillar and stay in the jar.
In order to transform, I have to build it a chrysalis. (No, it doesn't do the work for me—it's not a real caterpillar, silly.) That takes work, and I'm willing to do the work. Where the real pain, and potential for personal loss, comes in is that the caterpillar has to shed some mass.
Like, a lot of mass.
We're talking biiiiig, fat caterpillar destined to come out as a dainty, slender-bodied thing with gossamer wings.
As I mentioned, I have just over 400k words. Do I even need to tell you that's a ridiculously large amount of content?
Just to put it in perspective, the longest Harry Potter book, which is #5, The Order of the Phoenix, is around 285k words. That's a big, thick book. I'm looking at it, right there on my shelf. And at that point, Rowling was already a well-established writer with literally millions of people all over the world hanging on her every word, waaaaaiiiiitiiiinng for each next book to be published. When it came out, most readers were ecstatic to see just how thick that volume was, ready to savor each scene and delay as long as possible the inevitable moment when the last word had been devoured and there was nothing left but to go back to outer darkness and gnashing of teeth, a.k.a. waiting (for another year or two) for the next installment of Harry's story.
Untested, first-time author tries to publish something nearly twice that in length? Cue the maniacal laughter of publishers everywhere.
Yeah, so the caterpillar has stopped eating and now needs to shed some serious weight. I guarantee you an editor would make me cut it in half. At least.
Now, there is the possibility that I don't have a butterfly—I have a moth, instead. Big, pursy body; majestic, colorful wings. There are some gorgeous moths out there that put your average butterfly completely to shame. If you don't believe me, read Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter.
(Of course you believe me; I'm entirely credible. Read it anyway, here or for free on Kindle here. It's one of my favorite books.)
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| oleander hawk moth |
But the general public, lepidopterists excluded, don't really care much about moths. They like butterflies. And definitely my book is not going anywhere unless it can fly. So cocoon or chrysalis, either way... it's time to transform.
I may currently be in the midst of an irrational mood swing, but I am generally a fairly reasonable person, and even I, fond as I am of that caterpillar, can see some things that could go. The fact is, some of what I wrote, I wrote for me, because I needed to feel my way through my characters' journey; but it will actually be a better story if the end reader isn't privy to all that detail.
Rule #1 of writing: What you don't say is usually more important than what you do.
So the next step is to put the caterpillar on the carving block and start whittling. How's that for some gruesome mixing of metaphors?
But really, I'm in way over my head. This is the other part of my current grief. There's just no way that I can produce a butterfly—or moth—without an experienced third party looking over my shoulder and giving me some direction.
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| eastern tailed blue butterfly |
And never mind that I got this far. The idea that such an editor exists—an editor who would actually find me and my WIP to be exactly their preferred flavor of tea—and that I could somehow stumble across that editor in the right time and the right way and we go pick out curtains together...
Well, the word miraculous comes to mind.
But then...
Isn't that exactly the word you would use to describe that incredible, improbable metamorphosis that all caterpillars endure to fulfill their life's calling?
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