Ten days into my revision process.
I’m adding a new chapter, padding it in between chapters four and five to fill in what I think was missing. Her ceiling had become their floor now. She watches the workers crawling over the glass frame, fixing it. Dora still has the last surviving piece of the stained glass; a pale, marble-blue pane that somehow survived the accident.
I’ve decided to go with a collage-style approach for revising my novel, so I’ve printed out the entire manuscript once again just so I can cut it up and play around with the chapters. I’m physically moving things around and writing by hand, and even though I know it’s going to take so much longer, I think this is really the only way for me to do it. It’s actually very fun to work this way, reading the sentences out loud to hear how they truly sound before I commit to writing them all over again.
On the 19th of March, I felt quite sad. The only thing that could shake off that sadness and heaviness in my heart was to engross myself in something else. I had to give a presentation on Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous prose manifesto and its connection to the poetry film Pull My Daisy, so I poured my soul into the task. I studied both the film and the manifesto obsessively. When I presented it to the class, the teacher was in awe of the level of enthusiasm I brought into the room and the kind of conversation I managed to create. Honestly, I felt great. I knew my shit. I delivered. But that manifesto on spontaneous prose really influenced me too, and I kept thinking about blowing and blowing and blowing – the way a jazz saxophonist might play uninterrupted, unconcerned with grammar or punctuation.
