Finished!

Excuse me while I laugh.



Okay, I'm back. So, three months ago—wait, let me check—holy cow, it was exactly three months ago! I'm a man of my word! Anyway, back on August 12th, I announced I was virtually chucking my novel in the trash and rewriting the whole thing. I said "Give me three months from tomorrow." Well, I wrote the last sentence of that rewritten book on Saturday, November 13th.

Finished?

No!

Not by a long shot. Well, it's a whole lot closer than it was before, but now I've essentially got another rough draft on my hands. I've gotta go through it again and tweak the emotional responses and speech of characters, work on setting (which I frequently forget about), get rid of repetition and redundancy (get it?), and pay a lot of attention to verb choice. And delete commas. They always creep in where they're not wanted.

So what did I do with that three-month-long rewrite, aside from have a lot of fun? I got the story right. Everything makes sense. The characters come alive. It's twenty-thousand words shorter! I've finally—finally!—got a good framework to start making pretty.

A year ago, if I'd known I'd have to rewrite every single sentence of the whole book, I'm not sure I ever would have started. But here I am. If I thought I'd have to do it again, I'd probably give up right now. But I don't. (The hardest things only get done by people ignorant of what they're really in for.) Soooo...

Here I go!

Again!

Comments

  1. AlbertaNovember 16, 2010 at 2:01 PM

    Impressive! Most people would have given up a long time ago. And it's no small feat to write a novel in 3 months, even a rough draft. Congrats! Go celebrate!

    ReplyDelete
  2. SpendloveNovember 17, 2010 at 7:56 AM

    Props man! Can't wait to read the finished product.

    ReplyDelete

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