Sometimes You Write a Book
Sometimes you write a book and when you finish tapping the last key and have a zillion words staring back at you from the laptop screen you realize the book’s just no damn good and you’ve got to start over but how?
Coming soon on Amazon…
Well, first you pour a bucket of ice over your head to chill your inner fury at messing up a good story idea. Then you stuff the manuscript into some secret place so no one else can see it and shame you. Let it simmer there all by itself. Until, one bright day bingo! you decide to take it up again.
Of course, that bright day dims just a bit as you pull on sterile gloves to pluck the manuscript from hiding. Fan off the bad odor. Clap on dark glasses to shield your eyes. And search through the pages with a good sharp ax to uncover those few bits worth salvaging in rewrite.
You ax away words in their thousands. Hack away hundreds of pages. Chop out all that overwriting, all those arcane similes and comic cynicisms, all that too much too much. Until you’re left with the skeleton of your story idea staring back at you pleading to put good meat on its bones.
But meat with a cocky new attitude that will snare a reader and draw him/her into a story you once believed in and now can believe in again.
Ah, I suppose you want an IRL example of all this? Okay. Long ago, I decided to rewrite the Arthurian legend based strictly on sixth century A.D. facts and possibilities. No myth, no magic, no fantasy, just the real stuff. Good solid historical fiction.
Had a ball doing the research and writing. Published the novel. Waited for the cheers of gratitude from readers. Crickets. No one wanted to read it. Oof! So I dared give the book a readerly read. Yep, it wasn’t worth the eyestrain – nothing but endless brawls between unwashed knights and backstabbing ladies, pretty much what history tells us late Roman Britain was all about. Lots of gut-turning scenes do not make the soul-wrenching core of a novel to grip readers.
I yanked the book from publication and pretended I’d never heard of the guy who wrote it. Hid away the manuscript and let the story idea simmer a looong while. Before I took up my word-cutting ax and grabbed my laptop to re-flesh the skeleton with a dash of, oh, snark.
Snark became the book’s core because snark is very human. We all like snark, except when it’s aimed at us. But we really like reading snarky stories because they are very human stories.
I stuffed lots of the stuff into Merlin in the Mirror to make a weird fantasy of a lady Merlin who doesn’t believe in magic, a boy Arthur who doesn’t want to be king, a grimy old sword stuck in a rock and, toward the end of the tale, a vegetable starship or two and a vintage Ferrari. Plus a couple of kind words about those chummy black holes. Does that promise enough snark to persuade you to sample the novel on Amazon?
I hope so. Because, if no one reads this version, as everyone on Earth quite sensibly chose to ignore the original, I’ll have to give up fine literature and concentrate on training my flea circus.
© 2025 Steven Hardesty