another update on novel
in my last post, i explained that after having “completed” my novel late last year and spending months querying agents, i was given a blessing — told by an agent that in order for her to consider representing me and the novel, it would need to beefed up considerably. she didn’t tell me how many words to add, just that its word count at the time — about 43k — wasn’t something she felt she could sell to publishers.
update on novel
i’ve always had a deep-rooted compulsion to create (specifically to write, more specifically to write original stories, scenes, or characters), but i’ve also always had an equally-powerful (probably more powerful) reluctance to declare the things i create completed and ready to share with people. in fact i’ve never — still, as of right now — shared any of my fiction with a stranger or published any of it anywhere. in 2016, i shot a low-budget feature film (which i self-financed), and i’ve never shared it either; it doesn’t feel complete, because it’s “not good enough” to share. and look, if you’re an artist, there’s a 99.9% chance you’ve felt this feeling at some point. but that’s not how art works; that’s not what art is. art is meant to be vulnerable, imperfect. there are obviously once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-century works of art that exist, and maybe some of the artists who’ve created them thought they were perfect, but probably not; and it’s probable that at the time those artists released those works, they were in the mastery phase of their craft, not the infancy of it.