I wish I could claim I had a nice, inspirational, well-thought-out post for you, Squiders, but I have spent the last hour scrubbing paint off of my floors because, despite the gazillion drop cloths, my husband still manages to get paint everywhere. He even somehow managed to get it all over the dining room floor, which is completely separated from the kitchen by a wall. True talent.
(I spent most of the time doing it on hands and knees, but then I realized I own a Swiffer WetJet which, while crap for actually mopping, is good for some things.)
So instead of something lovely, you get a kitchen ceiling analogy.
We are redoing our kitchen ceiling because my husband dislikes flourescent lights and I do not care enough to stop him. So, without further adieu, ways redoing my kitchen ceiling is like writing a novel.
It doesn’t come out quite right the first time.
I think we all wish that there was such things as perfect first drafts but, sadly, there are not. Bits need to be rewritten, character motivations need to be better thought out, and subplots may end up not fitting. Alas. Luckily there is time to fix things. (In the kitchen’s case, we had to redo the texturing twice.)
Sometimes it takes longer than you think.
“We’ll be done in two days,” my husband said. Two weeks later, we’ve still got two, maybe three, steps to go. Novels go much the same way. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, a novel just won’t get done in the amount of time you think it should take. (Alternately, sometimes they go faster. Rarely, though.)
It makes a mess.
Much like the paint everywhere and the dust (oh God, the dust), novels are never as clean as you like them to be the first (or sometimes the second, or the third) time through. There are loose ends, extraneous characters, and plot holes the size of elephants. And it takes a while to clean everything up.
In the end, it’s better than when you started.
Sure, it takes a lot of work and you suspect there’s drywall dust in all your food, but even you have to admit that it was worth it. And so it goes with your novel, so don’t give up.
(Seriously, though, drywall dust everywhere.)
If you’re lucky, you won’t be finding drywall dust in the back of cupboards that were never opened during the work. We found purple paint dust (from using a paint sprayer) in the back corners of top shelves after moving out of the townhouse. Six years after we used the paint.