Fixing the Story

I made it through the first quarter of the book in revisions yesterday. At this stage, I'm just fixing the story. I'll worry about the words later. So far, I've cut an entire chapter's worth of material. I cut a huge chunk of chapter two and a huge chunk of chapter three, and now what's left of both chapters is the new chapter two. I imagine I'll be adding at least a chapter's worth of new material in the middle to make up for it. There are a couple of characters I introduced, then forgot about, and then they became important at the end, so I need to incorporate them more throughout so they don't just reappear out of nowhere at the end.

Today starts the hard part. I don't think I'll make it through that many pages because a lot of it will be new writing, and that will require a lot of figuring things out. Still, if I can average about a couple of chapters a day, I'll get this round of rewrites done before WorldCon.

I've already made my Epic List of Stuff That Must Be Done Before WorldCon, with targeted dates. The list doesn't look as bad as I feared it would, but then there are a couple of items on there (like finishing revisions) that require several hours a day from now until then. And I keep adding items to the list as they occur to me (the reason I keep a list). The idea of making the list so soon is that I can start dealing with little things or make sure I'm on top of big things so that departure is as stress-free as possible. That's going to be tough when I'm working on a book at the same time. Someday, I'll get the hang of mixing life with writing books, but for now it seems like I'm all or nothing -- when I'm working on a book, nothing else happens.

For instance, my harp practice has really fallen by the wayside. I only seem to touch the harp when I have to go upstairs and reset the modem and wireless router for my daily Internet outage (funny, those AT&T Internet commercials about how terrible it is when the Internet is down are a fairly accurate representation of my experience with AT&T Internet. Either I have a bad modem or their service crashes at least once a day and requires rebooting everything). I play the harp while I'm waiting for everything to reset.

Now to start thinking of how to fix the rest of this book …