Satisfied Exhaustion

Last night, I finished the final edit of the first novel I ever wrote. technically, it is half of the first novel, but since I am now choosing to make the entire family drama into four separate novels for a series, it is now officially the first.

I have learned many things on this journey, and one is that writing is not really a solitary experience. I've had many friends and colleagues on this road, and each have provided insights, assistance, and solutions I did not expect, and the result has been a better narrative. I've also learned that writing fiction in a historical time frame is daunting, even if you were there at the same age as your characters, which is largely the case with this book I wrote. It is remarkable how difficult it is to properly conjure up the phrases that were in style back then, the subtle nuances of what was permissible in the culture of the day, and indeed, whether or not certain laws had already been enacted. In placing my story in 1978, in Toronto, I hit the crossroads of a few important timelines- Canada's move into the metric system from Imperial, Ontario's change of the legal drinking age from 18 to 19, and the addition of mandatory seat belts in cars, just to name three of them. It was a time of great movement in music as well, just before the video revolution, and just beyond the punk rock invasions, and all of these things I mention had an impact on the story I was telling.

In looking at my notes and edits, I am astounded at the amount of changes that had to be made because I was off by mere months in some of my recollections, or because a location I fondly remembered either had not been created yet or had already been closed or demolished at the time of the scene I was painting. One of the keener observation a reader friend mentioned when he read a draft version was how much smoking there was in every scene. Yes, there was a time in Toronto when you could smoke everywhere, and you often did, one after the other. I know this because I lived it, on airplanes, in restaurants, at school.

Language was also a big undertaking, as slang changes with the times. It was a challenge to make sure expressions from later periods did not seep into the dialogue, and that the decade stayed relatively accurate. As one of my friends said to me today- no one will notice if you get it right, but they will if you get it wrong. It is my hope that will all those consecutive readings and rewrites, I managed to get most of it right. I'm sure I will hear otherwise if that is not the case.

My final thought is this- without the ever-modern marvel of Google, I would never have been able to look most of these issues up and resolved them so quickly. Funny ol' world, innit?