Realizing

So my friend finished reading Remembrance last week. He promised he would have it to me before I left for England and it appeared in my mailbox at ten a.m. on the day I left. I am very grateful to him for doing this. Or maybe I'm just grateful for him for doing it and not judging me. Because I was worried. Really worried. I gave this book to him in July and I didin't stop fretting until... wait, have I stopped?

Besides the dark scenes that scared me when I wrote them, I also read through the book while he was still revising and realised that I don't write like that anymore. That's technically a good thing, since it means I've grown as a writer, but I was afraid of what my friend would think of me. I wanted to snatch my novel back and give him something newer, something more up-to-date with my current style.

I didn't though, and I'm glad I let him finish. Well, sort of- I still feel ashamed of some parts that I wrote. But his editing job was good- he noted not only what he liked but what he thought was terrible... and he used those words, too. Nothing like getting it told straight out :p I think the edits will definitely help me being Remembrance up to the next level, whatever that level may be (though I know that this is not a novel I will seek to publish.)


In other Remembrance news, three things happened to me today involving it. First of all, one of my friend's comments during the darkest scene of the book was, "Getting a little like V for Vendetta are we?" Though I love that movie, I haven't watched it in about two years, so I wasn't really sure how close I was to the film. Extremely, as it turns out- I just finished watching it. It's nothing that needs to be changed, thankfully, but it's funny how some things stay with you.
I was walking through Kensington, London today and made my friends stop for a second while I took a picture of a street because one of my characters, Gloria, lived there (or at least, she would have before it was bombed in the Blitz.)
And then about an hour ago, in a fit of writery-actory-ness, I decided I needed to better figure out why my main character and her two best friends are so uncomfortable in one another's presence at the end of the book. I mean, of course there's already a reason, but I wanted to know each girl's specific feelings on it. I took a bit to write down these reasons, and then I started crying. Because what I realised is that the three girls represent three different sides of me. I know people always say that you always write a version of yourself into each character in some way, but it was still a shock to me. I always considered myself most like my main character... but I still considered her to be very different from me, and I knew I wasn't anything like her friends- until today. And yes, this discovery made me weep.


Anyway, getting off that dramatic subject and onto an unrelated one, if you're not already, you should check out/follow my London blog, where I write about all the adventures I'm having in jolly old England!