August 13, 2012

The Happiest Days are when books are uploaded

To paraphrase a line Olivia de Havilland said in Gone With The Wind , "The happiest days are when books are uploaded."

There's that wonderful feeling of accomplishment at having completed a project.  All those marathon writing sessions are forgotten in the joy of seeing your book's page on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and the other popular retail sites, and seeing your author page get a little fuller.  So is it time to rest on your laurels?

Heck, no!

It's time to get busy on the next project.

I am now in the midst of ruthless red pen edits for the upcoming Something Real before sending it to be edited.  I'm loving what I'm seeing (even as I cross out and revise my own words), but around this time I always get those inevitable feelings of, Will I ever get this project finished?

The answer to that is, of course I will, and it'll be wonderful.  But sometimes being a writer is exhausting.  Even as I do these edits to make it as sparkling as possible for my editor, I'm also storyboarding a book I was inspired to do ever since the untimely, tragic death of Michael Jackson (so you know it's been three years) in hopes of being able to get that middle filled in (I know how the story will open and how it will end), as well as not being able to stop my thoughts from wandering off to my next, partially written, project.  It can all be a bit much.

Gone With The Wind time again.  No, not the movie, but the making of it.  Maybe it's time for me to pop in the DVD I recorded of The Making of Gone With The Wind , which I regard as my grown-up writer's version of The Little Engine That Could.  This documentary from 1989 (50 years after the film premiered) tells of the struggles producer David O. Selznick had in bringing this impossibly long novel to the screen.  This is a man who had just about each of his fingers in a different pot as he worked on several quality pictures at a time.  Writers brought out to Hollywood to whittle the 1000+ page novel down into a treatment (not even a script that early in the process) found themselves being asked to prune dialogue on other Selznick productions currently in production, like The Prisoner of Zenda and the original A Star Is Born.  Even as the postproduction process began after a lengthy shoot that included the firing of one director and a nervous breakdown of another, Selznick began to turn his attentions to the upcoming Intermezzo and Rebecca.  In other words, this man never stopped.  But somehow it all got done, and extremely well.  That is what inspires me.

So I'm going to keep plugging along.  Not only is writing what I do, but it's who I am.

As for David O. Selznick, after Rebecca was released in 1940, he closed Selznick International Pictures but continued working, writing, producing, developing projects for others.  I, on the other hand, intend to continue bringing readers good reads through Bunderful Books...to keep getting that wonderful feeling when a new book is uploaded, hopefully for many years to come.