A New Approach

At least, I think it’s new. Perhaps I had these intentions when I originally received the critique from my brother, but my addled brain can’t remember. But I know I didn’t act on it!

So, I mentioned on here that late last summer I got stuck, stuck, stuck at 40k words on FRACTURED RADIANCE and shipped the manuscript off to my brother for some help. And he was awesome and read (almost) the whole thing. (He’s getting his PhD and has three kids, so I was grateful for whatever I could get! Plus, the last few chapters he didn’t get to might ultimately get cut.)

Well, there was a lot to critique on. Which left me with a lot of edits.

At first I thought, “Okay, cool, now I can write my ending with all of this in mind.”

But guess what! It doesn’t work that way. At least, not for me. And not with these edits. Because some of these are huge and will color how the book ends. So, I’m going through the book scene by scene and entering in these edits (along with a few from my former writing group*). This is resulting in quite a lot of rewriting.

Guess what again! While it feels like a lot of work (and certainly it is), it’ll be less in the long run (hopefully) because my ending will be better (hopefully).

It’s pretty slow-going, but that’s okay in a way. Because I spent so much time away from this manuscript, I started feeling not-so-excited about it. But reading it has resparked** my excitement.

Have you ever taken this approach with a book before? Are you an edit-as-you-go sort of writer, or the get-it-out-as-fast-as-you-can-and-you’ll-go-through-all-that-editing-crap-later type?

*I miss them! sniff sniff

**that’s a word, right?***

***not according to WordPress