Breathing new life...

... into my first novel, A Birthday Suicide. It's been a slow-going effort, I finished the first draft a year ago, right around my birthday, which is fifteen days from now. (Well, sixteen- it's still the 21st for another twenty-one minutes.) Since then I've started the rewrite so many times I lost count. I got five chapters into it this time, and thought I had written some great stuff, but overall I still wasn't inspired. A friend of mine was gracious enough to read the first draft and give me good insights. She did that a while ago, and I just recently sent her the first three chapters of my rewrite, knowing she would tell me the truth about it. I figured that if I was on the right track I would just keep trudging on and hope the muse found me. While she agreed I was improving the writing of it, she gave me guidance on a different direction to take it. And I am grateful, because new life has been breathed into a project I was becoming afraid would end up "in the drawer," never to be finished.