I’ve been corresponding with a friend and we’ve been talking about Owning Wednesday. If you’re a long-time Annabel fan…by that I mean, you bought one of my early, early books eons ago from Lulu.com, then you might have read the original version of Owning Wednesday that was about 20,000 words longer and written in first person.
At this friend’s urging I dug it out this week and had fun reading through it. The current Loose Id version is so much more polished; this Lulu version was really…wow. I just bled it all out on the page back then. A lot of what was cut was long blah blah blahs of what Wednesday was thinking, especially about Vincent. I always loved this little passage though, where she reflects on her master/slave relationship with him.
Yes, I admit, there were also times he was just plain cruel to me. Intentionally or unintentionally, there were times he hurt me to the quick. Sometimes he hurt me with whips or paddles, sometimes he hurt me with words carefully selected to cut, but that was just part of our arrangement, and he almost always soothed the pain away.
And then, there were those heart stopping moments when he would let his hand linger long on my cheek, let his fingertips trail more softly than usual over my back, or let his lips rest on my nape just a second longer than was appropriate for a master and slave. Those moments were rare and seldom, but when they came, I treasured them like diamonds. I had at least enough of them to make a choker, if not a necklace. Enough to make two bracelets, at least.
If you haven’t read the Loose Id version of Owning Wednesday, you can find the blurb and buy links by clicking on the book cover below. Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me. 🙂
I admit it, though I like the tighter rewrite very much, I much prefer OW in its original. Well, not the original original… you know what I mean… It has a feel that the LooseId version did not. Maybe raw, with the character emotions and the writing style? It was a beginning on so many levels. *sigh*
I know… I was thinking about you yesterday when I was reading over it. It really evolved over those couple of years. I remember when Vincent was called Steven, LOLLLLLL.
I’m curious as to why you rewrote some of it and the process of which passages to change or delete. I was over on Kitty Thomas page and her book is longer than she bargained for.
Now every time an author talks about rewriting a old book, I think of artist Bob Ross (Thks PBS.org) who would paint and us the viewers are like WoW beautiful and think he was finish but nope he would add this and that and more! And the end product was absolutely beautiful, with all the add one.
So I guess how do you as a writer know when its finished or when you have to go back and do a Owning Wednesday rewrite or go back and add some more (always been curious about the writing process)
Some writers say the characters kind of write it the book themselves and they just write what is told to them.
I guess the frustrating thing about writing is that you don’t ever really know when it’s finished…or if you wrote it right. In the case of the first Owning Wednesday, it was too emotional and not erotic enough. I remember the sex scenes were a couple sentences long…but then Wednesday went on for pages and paragraphs about her inner emotional turmoil. So…not good for widespread erotica audiences. 🙂
But it was sad for me to cut a lot of that. On the other hand it was nice to pump up the sex scenes and make it a more sexy and streamlined book for wider audiences. In the case of OW, though, I ended up with a completely different book and as I’ve gone forward, I’ve tried to avoid that ever happening again because now I’ll always feel like there are two versions of that book. It’s not a terrible thing…just weird.
As for characters writing the book themselves, it sounds crazy but that really does happen! And it’s really aggravating when you’ve outlined a story to go a certain way, and your characters start to change and reveal stuff as you write, and you have to completely change directions and scrap your outline and plans! Yes, that happens. Soooo aggravating, lol.
I just finished the companion book to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. She explains that she never used an outline or had a plot in mind when writing, she just wrote snippets and then tied them all together. Like you, and probably most storytellers, the characters just write themselves, no matter what’s planned.
Now THAT is just plain cruel. I was almost forgeting that was a “Black and white” I never read u.u.
I’d love to read that original version of OW! Is there any way i could get hold of a copy?
No, I can’t give it out anymore since Loose Id hold the rights now. But I might share more of the unpublished snippets of it in the future.They can give you a little extra insight into Wednesday.