A rewrite too big for June

Createspace, an on-demand publishing website owned by Amazon, is one of the big corporate sponsors of National Novel Writing Month. For the past few years, they’ve run a promotion whereby all recognized winners of the 100-page Nanowrimo challenge get a coupon code free for one free printed ‘proof book’, including shipping.

I’ve gotten two of my manuscripts printed out for free with Createspace, and it’s really cool to see my own words professionally bound and all that. I’ve been planning for what to do with the coupon code I got with last year’s Nano win, and I was planning to do a quick rewrite of my 2009 Nano-manuscript, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” and send it off before the June 30th deadline.

There’s just one problem with that. As I get into ‘Children’, I get the sense that I won’t be at all satisfied with a quick rewrite. There’s some great material in the current draft, but also one big problem that keeps coming up, and it’s an old problem for writers.

My main character, Tom, is telling the readers about a lot of stuff that’s happened. I’m not showing the reader enough. (I told you it was an old problem.)

So, after thinking about this a bit, I don’t think I’m going to send in anything ‘Children’-related for Createspace this year. I’m leaning towards putting together a collection of shorter fiction.

It’s a bit disappointing that I won’t have ‘Children’ in proof copy this summer, but that’s probably better than getting a printed bound copy that I look at and think “This isn’t nearly as good as what I did with it next” or worse, “This isn’t nearly as good as what I want to do with it.”