By Kendra Leah, @Writing2Day
Wow, this feels like quite the milestone. This means I am just over half way through retyping my manuscript which is at 95,000 words. The reason for the retype? I started writing this novel in my early twenties. I finished writing Chapter 9 the night before my first child was born in 1990. Age then 25, age now 45 – yikes!
That’s twenty years that my book has sat dormant. I actually started writing on an old electric typewriter in the mid-80’s. From there, I was so thrilled to get a word processing typewriter. I thought I was in heaven when I could see my words going across that 3″ strip and actually save them to a disk. Looking back, I’m not really sure how I managed it but I did manage to get my manuscript from the word processor to my first computer and kept saving it and putting it on to each new computer I have owned. I think that’s quite an accomplishment in itself and speaks to the fact that I always knew I would return to writing.
As you can probably imagine with the way technology changes and programs get updated, this work in progress did not continue to load in each new device in its original form. For the most part it translated quite well, but it is intermixed with lots of fun characters here and there – anything from squares to fun symbols that I can’t even describe, lol. Rather than proof and fix through 95,000 words, I decided I would much rather retype the manuscript.
This actually is killing two birds with one stone as not only did the manuscript need to be fixed but after twenty years I definitely needed a refresher on where the book was going. I lost my outline years ago, but it is still in my mind that I had three more chapters to write in order to wrap up the story. It is really quite amazing that I can be typing away and anticipating the words I wrote that long ago just like I had sat down at the typewriter yesterday. I figure by the time I’m done typing those last three chapters will come to me. And, focusing on typing has helped me to focus on truly reading what I wrote. I have a tendency to gloss over things that I have written since I basically know what’s coming. I’ve definitely found some glaring spots that are calling out to me for a rewrite but for now I am just making a note and moving on.
I am looking forward to completing this phase of the project and really getting back in to writing. Is there anybody else out there who started out following their writing dream and set it aside for such a long period of time? I would love to hear from you.
