The Glass Maker's Daughter

Yesterday I sent in to the editor what I hope is the last big revision to the young adult novel now known as The Glass Maker’s Daughter.

The book, a political fantasy adventure set in an alternate-world version of Renaissance Venice, has had a long journey. It was the first work I wrote (under the title The Horns of Cassaforte) after finding an agent, but before I’d sold You Are SO Cursed! or any of the thirteen books that followed. It went without a home for five years until the nice people at Flux decided it would be right for their line.

Though he is enthusiastic about the book, my editor wanted some revisions—and he was right to ask for them. Although The Glass Maker’s Daughter is probably my most intricate and sophisticated novel in terms of plot construction, it had one gaping flaw that I never really noticed: the antagonist didn’t appear until nearly the last chapter of the book. He was talked about, certainly. The results of his actions are what fueled the plot. But either he should have been completely absent and thus an abstract and malevolent threat, or present throughout.

I decided to take the latter route. Since I had room to expand, I went back and wrote an entirely new chapter for early in the book, in which the antagonist pays a visit to the heroine’s family. I had him make an appearance mid-book. Of course I kept the scene toward the end, but I noticed that once it had more support beneath it, it had more resonance and meaning than before.

All the other changes my editor suggested I make were minor in nature. Smoothing some characters, giving others some tics. He proposed, for fun, that I give a secondary antagonist some kind of substance abuse problem, like an addiction to an exotic opiate. It was a brilliant suggestion—I ended up having the character constantly opening a silver box and dabbing a creamy herbal snuff paste into the hollows above his canine teeth. Not only is it a dislikable habit, but it allows two of the characters to smell him coming at pivotal points in the book. Additionally, after the snuff addict is, well, snuffed, his silver box can be discarded in a callous way.

A late-timeline revision like this one takes a lot of time and brain-work. It’s not a matter of simply breezing through the manuscript and correcting a few typos. Instead, it requires the writer to read the book with the eyes and expectations of someone who’s never seen it before—to be willing to re-conceptualize, edit ruthlessly, and to stop treating his work like a sacred text. There were points in my revision in which I felt as if I’d taken apart a vacuum, confident that I could put it back together from memory, only to find that suddenly all the pieces looked a little alien. And maybe from someone else’s vacuum. When everything’s pieced back together, the end result is a better work than before.

The book still makes me cry at four points. I weep near the beginning, when the heroine encounters her life-changing setback. I really start to cry at the end of the book’s first third, when she makes a temporary triumph over adversity. There’s a romantic encounter near the end that makes me sniffle. But then the waterworks really start at the book’s climax, which is so neatly engineered that it’s as if some master storyteller (and not me) created it. I was up at two in the morning finishing the revision the other night, tears pouring out of my eyes as I tidied up the last two chapters!

I love this book. I’m glad it’s being given a chance.