Beyond the Book

Did you ever start a piece of writing and forget about it, only to be surprised when you found it and read it?”

The simple answer to this question is yes. Most of the time if I start something I finish it, but sometimes stuff happens and I lay a work aside. That happened to me when I wrote Book 3 in my Lovinggood trilogy. I’d tell you the name of the book, but I can’t think of a good one. I got it into a place where I felt comfortable with it and put it away, thinking I’d come back in a few weeks and see what I thought of it. Well, I forgot about it. It was a year or more before I rediscovered the manuscript. I was surprised to see how much I had done and also how much I still had to do. I revised again, but I still haven’t sent it to the publisher. I don’t know if it measures up to the other two books in the series. 

I also have two or three manuscripts that I wrote years ago when I first started writing. I pulled one out just to see if it was useable, but in its current condition it isn’t. I loved my heroine and empathized with my hero, but oh it was so bad in so many ways. I had awkward sentence structure, lots of head hopping, and too many POVs. But you know, I really liked the premise of the story, and as I said I loved my heroine so I’ve decided to work on it. I guess I should say rewrite it because there’s a lot of work to be done. I think it’ll be fun though.

I also surprise myself when I read something I already had published. In some cases I’m surprised at how I could have written such a bad sentence, etc, but at other times I’m happy to find good parts that I had forgotten about. When I really like something I wrote, it makes me feel so good. 

So authors, what about you? Do you have works that you’ve forgotten?