It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...
What am I celebrating this week?
It's the weekend! And I have nothing much on this week which makes me happy. I'm planning to go to a movie - something I haven't done for a while - and to write another chapter of A Stranger to Kindness.
I realised this week that I missed the 10 year anniversary of becoming a published novelist. It was in January, but because my first publisher went out of business and An Unstill Life was re-published by my current publisher, I didn't have that date at the front of my mind. It's kind of hard to believe it's been 10 years, but then, I do now have five published novels.
To kind of celebrate that 10 year anniversary, I decided to do something I haven't done before and go back and read those published books (except My Murder Year which only released last year so is still pretty fresh in my mind from editing) which has been interesting. After finishing each of those books I thought I'd never forget a single word of them because I'd spent so long with each of them, but I was surprised at how much I'd forgotten about them.
I thought I'd find re-reading some of the older ones a bit cringeworthy - I'm pretty sure I'm a better writer now than I was when I wrote them - but I was pleasantly surprised. I found a rather embarrassing number of stupid errors in one of them, but I can only blame myself for that... I've always said Stumped was my favourite of my own books and after re-reading it, it's still true. That one is good! If it's not tacky for me to say that myself.
There were parts of all the others that I'd probably write differently now, but they're not terrible. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed re-reading Chasing the Taillights which is probably the oldest of these stories in terms of when I wrote the first draft. And I was surprised at The Sidewalk's Regrets - there's a lot more of me in that one than I remembered!
So here's to there being more, better books in the next 10 years!
What a fun way to celebrate. And it's not tacky at all!
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