Now that a couple of months have passed since I launched this blog, I’ve settled into a routine of sorts for putting up a new post.  I’m not one of those “I spend two hours at the computer every day, no matter what!” bloggers.  I sit down only when I feel inspired to write, then work on a draft until I get the sense that it’s ready. Sometimes I’ll hear my inner self nudging me: “Stop fussing with it. Post it, already.” And so I do. Once I’ve put a new post up, I generally feel quietly happy and content, glad to have sent a little bit more of my true thoughts and true self out into the world.   But last week, when I posted the first two chapters of my novel, Above the River, I noticed that I felt even happier than I usually do when I hit “Publish”.

            Back at the beginning of March, when I was caught up in the whirlwind of creating a website and composing my first few blog posts, my novel couldn’t have been further from my mind.  But once I settled into the routine I described above, quiet, novel-related thoughts began popping into my head: “What about your book?” Or, “Is that it for Above the River?” After a few days of this, it occurred to me, out of the blue, that I could publish my novel on my website –  in serialized form, as blog posts.  It felt like such a nineteenth-century thing. That appealed to me. So old-school! Plus, what better time to post a long work of fiction than now, when so many folks are stuck at home? Most of all, though, the idea of publishing my novel in small installments just felt super fun. My inner self agreed.

            The trickiest part of putting this new plan into action was deciding which version of the novel to post. I had three and a half drafts.  Which one to use? Because, to be clear, I had no intention of doing any more revisions before posting the book. As I saw it, I’d already spent way too much time fussing over this novel as it was. I needed to just choose a version and go with it. So, I sat down one morning and opened up the big binder that contained what constituted my third draft: the printout of the second draft plus the handwritten edits I still hadn’t entered into the file on my computer. I flipped through the pages. Perfect, I thought. I’ll type in the edits and… Boom! Done!

            The next day, I began reading the novel on the computer, right from the beginning. And as I read, I typed in the handwritten changes from the printout. But at some point during this process, I also began making other, new, changes here and there. Just a few words, a phrase, wherever it felt right to me to do that. By the time I reached the middle of Chapter 2, I noticed that I was feeling really happy. I stopped writing and focused on what I was experiencing. And in that moment, I recognized it: this was the joyful state I had somehow always inhabited while composing the first two drafts – and which had slipped away at some point during my work on the third draft.

            That third draft period was when a deep fear began driving me to revise, revise, revise – in an attempt to postpone the day when I would have to risk rejection by sending my completed novel out into the world. I can see now that the fear drained nearly all the joy out of the writing process for me. By the time I began working on the re-envisioned novel back in February, I saw the draft in that big binder as deeply flawed. Although I knew my characters inside out by that point, I no longer felt close to them. As I saw it, all of those Gassmanns and Bunkes, along with the plot and the narrative form, needed to be either scrapped or drastically altered.

But last week, when I reentered the world of the novel, and reengaged with the characters and their story and the pure joy of writing, all of that suddenly shifted. I felt no trace of the old fear. I was simply thrilled to be back in the creative space of my novel. I began to feel so happy as I prepared those first two chapters! My heart overflowed with affection for all my characters, as if they were old friends I was seeing for the first time in ages.  “Awww, it’s Lina!” I caught myself thinking. Or, “Sheesh, Renate, loosen up!” It felt so sweet to be with them again. And I remembered: Yes, I really love this novel.

            I certainly didn’t anticipate this turnaround when I decided to serialize my book, but it came my way anyway. I got everything back this past week: the joy of writing, the love for my characters and for the story of their trials. I got my novel itself back, if that makes sense.

            I can’t say right now exactly which version of Above the River I’ll be posting in the coming weeks. Probably a combination of the second and third drafts, plus whatever else makes its way through me and out onto the page. All I know for sure is that when I clicked “Publish” last week and saw Chapters 1 and 2 of Above the River appear on my website, I felt something I hadn’t experienced with any of the other blog posts, not even the very first one: a giant burst of joy, a happiness so unbridled that it took me completely unawares.

And, damn it, it just felt like so much fun.