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What It’s Like to Be a Novelist
Sometimes the books just don’t work.
She’s like, “It’s actually really good.” She’d read about two-thirds of it, and I started to relax, and she comes up a couple hours later, and she has the last third of it rolled up into a bat, and she swats me on the top of the head with it and was like, “This part sucks, you ruined the whole thing; go back and rewrite the ending.” So that draft never saw the light of day outside the walls of my house. Even with a successful novel under my belt, I think if you divided the hours spent writing over the years, I would’ve been better off waiting tables, but it’s kind of enjoyable. You published a book, it was well reviewed, it was selling, your agent and your editor were happy, you weren’t working, and you were puttering around feeding and walking the dogs and writing when you wanted to.
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