Category: Droppington Place

Oh, the Saga of Me continues… wait, don’t sagas usually have a dramatic grand finale? Uh oh…

So, in the meanwhile that I’ve been re-working the half-maligned-yet-quite-ballyhhoed rewrite of a previously published novel, I happened to mention to my OWN lovely sister that I was rewriting a book.

My sister the psychologist! I’d written much of Droppington Place with her in mind! How did I not send her a copy?

She asked to read all three novels (Sawdust Man, Droppington Place, and Marigold’s End), and I apologetically sent them along.

What a knockhead was I to have excluded her from my reader’s list in the first place. But now all was fixed.

She picked out precisely the themes I’d intended in the first two novels, but get this… Ready?

Okay, a touch of backstory:

Droppington Place is the story of a twelve-year-old kid who gets trapped inside a magical realm made entirely of paper, overseen by a silly-yet-kinda-maniacal Elizabethan playwright overlord made of sawdust. What? It could happen.

Sawdust Man makes the playwright a sympathetic lead character in a bittersweet love story that takes a thousand years to tell. Same guy, different story.

So, here’s the really cool twist:

My sister the psychologist saw that Sawdust Man was actually a SEQUEL to Dropington Place!

Holy cats! Do you see what this means? My sawdust playwright just might be a recurring figure in any number of magical realism stories!

Why had I not seen this before? Many, many thanks are owed to you, dear writer friend, for riding with me on this crazy adventure, and certainly to my lovely sister the psychologist for her unflinching support and her crazy, zany, utterly brilliant idea!

It’s the Founding of an Empire!

This is a secret post. You’re not supposed to read it because it’s… duh, a secret!

I’ve written this same post so many times that I’m embarrassed to write it again. But you’re a writer, you know how it goes. You do something that you think is momentous, and you have to tell SOMEBODY.

Please keep this to yourself, but I’ve just finished, like ten minutes ago, the re-re-re-rewrite of my book.

Not the fourth rewrite to make it beautiful.

Not the third rewrite that takes out all the hackneyed eye-roller phrases (“this ends now”).

Nor even is it the second rewrite that ties the beginning to the end.

This isn’t really a rewrite at all, but a fresh new story with deepened characters and a reasonable plot. It just borrows elements from a previous version. Now, for the first time, that old story has a bottom to it.

Architect Penn Hsu tells us that if you knock down all but one wall of a house and rebuild the rest, it is no longer the same house. Ergo, ipso facto, allegro non troposphere, this is a new book.

Anyway, it’s done. At least I can tell YOU about it and not feel too foolish.

Nope, no , there it is.

Foolish through and through, because I keep finishing the same danged book!

This time is for real, though. Done and done.

Maybe…

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You work, work, work, and write and create and think and write and… wait a second, does that mean you ARE a writer?

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You spend so much of your heart and soul and sleepy long hours into your rewrite, and then, IT’S DONE!