Preemptive Retaliation

At the end of last week I finished my second draft of the novel tentatively titled as Francine is a Robot which is a title I played with initially as a very straightforward way of explaining the book to myself, except now I really like it and I think I’ll stick with it. Actually, that’s a lie, since the initial title was I am a robot, mimicking the opening lines. That was before the robot was called Francine. It was once called Ada (after Ada Lovelace) and it was once called Florence (after Florence and the Machine), and before that it had no name. It was an ageless faceless gender neutral culturally ambiguous adventure-person. Afgncaap, for short.

I did make a big thing about making the protagonist nameless and genderless. I did a lot of ‘They’s when referring to them in the third person, and played a lot with gender normalities of them and the characters around them. It made sense for the robot to be an everyman in one way or another, but in the end it was too much of an ask. I have an autonomous robot parading around an art gallery being mistaken for a human and leaning into that fact, having them gender neutral and anonymous was too much of an ask. Too much sauce for this burger.

I’ve digressed – at the end of last week I finished the second draft of my latest novel Francine is a Robot. I’ve been so excited for this, because it means I can finally get down to the real work of editing. For me, draft one is figuring things out. Getting a feel for the story and theme and characters. Draft two is rewriting draft one to what it should have been. Draft three is editing. It’s rearranging, typo correcting, sentence refining etc. It’s proper editing. It’s – the job is done so let’s make it better editing. It also means I can start working on other things. Other ideas that I’ve been mulling over and playing with. Stories that have legs and those legs are ready to walk.

Though, saying that, I find myself drawn back to Francine… I’m not done with the book yet. I want to make it right, to be happy with it. That’ll take time. Hopefully not too much.