Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

A new opening has been written and integrated into the manuscript in progress. Callooh and callay and all that. No seriously. I am genuinely frabjous about it.

I mean it didn’t grow unwieldy, it seems pretty elegant in terms of adding depth to character interactions and will help to inform later relationships. I got all verklempt at one point, which is generally a good sign. That or I veered way purple in my prose! I think some of my remaining 9 problems will actually be resolved by this beginning.

But.

The only way to know for sure it is to go through the book from start to finish, re-read and edit as I go to integrate for tone and content, to make the reflections line up, as it were. And that, my friends, is a pain in the ass/arse. Mostly because I knew I was always going to have to do it, once all the rewrites were done, but now I have to do it twice: now, and when all the other rewrites are done. Ugh. And of course I still have to restructure the end. It should be easier to do than the beginning, but I always think something will be easy before I start it. Occasionally I am right.

Is there a better way to do this? Probably. Or maybe I’m still scarred, and scared, by my three years editing The Killer and The Dead, and this feels like a doorway to that kind of obsession. It is easier to apply individual fixes and move on, satisfied by a checklist completed. I still have 4 or 5 of those, and will probably do a couple after this is posted, to clear the decks and leave only those problems that have roots and branches in many locations, the ones that need to be held in your mind as you work through the text, applying the right extras, removing the wrong messages, putting everything together harmoniously. Then you have to read it all over again to make sure you got it right. That’s the part I don’t want to do five times, as you end up snowblind to your flaws, flurries of words in your face to confuse and rob you of discernment, lose the horizon you were trying to navigate by. Just made up that metaphorical stretch there, whilst nodding to a previous blog. Not my best work, but what the hell.

So (yes it made it back in as a paragraph starter!), I’ll try to minimize the need for read-through editing as it gets tedious, and you lose focus with each repeated iteration.

All this has already taken too long, and I am now behind my schedule, which was to be done with the rewrites and edits by this weekend. La bummer. Grindstone meet nose. And on we go…

Be not disheartened, my writing chums and pals, this is an inevitable part of the (my!) process. It is what it is, there is always a period like this, when you just have to gut your way through. I assure you I will look back and laugh at all of this. And then forget it entirely until the next time I’m at this stage, chewing on words hoping they don’t go stale.

Keep your words fresh, my friends, they can’t be turned into croutons later.