Editing is continuing apace. I now have 6,500 words of new material completed, so I was able to get another 3,300 words written last week. I haven’t been quite as consistent as I’ve wanted, but I am making headway and pushing through the first section. I believe that by this time next week the first section will be done, putting me on track to finish the whole thing by the middle of January if not exactly my end of year goal. This is conservative, perhaps, but I have to keep balancing a significantly uneven amount of upcoming writing time. December may be better, especially when I’m taking time off around the holidays, but I also have upcoming business travel that’s almost certainly going to put a damper in my progress. Still, I’m through 10% of the initial wordcount and the beginning is the roughest part. That’s the good thing.

The counterpoint, unfortunately, to the beginning being the roughest part is that the beginning is also somewhat the simplest part, with the majority of the action happening in ‘Orientation’ being exposition. The scene after the one I’m on now becomes much more important because the conflict of the book is introduced, and it’s being significantly retooled. And when I change that conflict, several of the beats in the next section change fairly dramatically as well.

I’ve started to look into the next section of the story, ‘Rush’, and it’s definitively where a lot of the inciting action occurs. It’s also all over the place, and needs more focus considering I’m planning to cram more inciting action and at least one more character introduction in there. Using the spreadsheet to plan out the first section worked well, though the diagramming did illustrate to me what I did and didn’t want to change; the changes in that first section ended up being fairly minor so it somewhat remains to be seen if the diagramming method can help me do more surgery on the section. Even talking about it makes it more clear what needs to happen by the end of the section: Both love interests are single, the investigation is fully underway, and Colin begins having a change of heart. That last one is completely different from what happens in the current draft and when, but it needs to be if Colin as a character is getting a longer, more significant plot thread.

Thinking about the next section and its more comprehensive rearranging is what’s reminding me that some of the biggest changes in the first section are yet to come. While the next scene is still character introduction, after that we get the first kickoff of ‘plot’ in the story and that already has to change just based on the other changes I’ve already made. Beyond that, the end of the section will include the first completely new scene work, introducing a brace of characters much earlier than they came in in the previous draft and potentially negating the need for a later scene (which was going to have to be pulled forward anyway). It definitely looks like editing will be following a similar arc to the plot itself, with sections 1 and 5 being closest to their current form, 2 and 4 being a lot messier, and 3, the height of the events in the story, being potentially the messiest and the one needing the most work. Reworking the second section should do a lot for setting the stage for section 3, but a lot of the changes will be in scene-by-scene events; the three-party weekend is one of the few sequences of the story that’s been there since the first draft (which was completely different for the most part). One good thing about doing rewrites is that you get to think about what you’re actually going to change and then think through how that change cascades, as opposed to trying to pick through the story to maintain consistency.

One less good thing about doing rewrites is that the impacts on changes to your writing style become readily apparent. There’s probably some potential for editing to cut this down, but when I compare my rewrites to the existing scenes, the word count is increasing. The first day increased by 750 words (or around 50%), and the first scene of the second day increased by 300 words from 1600 to 1900. I think the second figure, around 20%, is going to be typical; I pulled forward two character introductions into day 1 so the section is clearly doing more work. Still, a 20% increase for a 68,000 word manuscript is 13,600 words, for a total of about 80,000. That’s not necessarily a problem; 100,000 words is a typical cutoff for non-genre fiction. That said, I am going to be doing more in this story. 20% is basically what I’m getting for straight rewrite, and there will be more content. That said, considering that the one thing I brutalize myself for when editing my Cannibal Halfling posts is conciseness, there’s probably a few good editing passes in there to make. I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, but at the same time noticing the novel slowly expanding is probably something to be wary of now, not at the end.

On one hand, I haven’t quite been consistent enough with writing to make my end-of-year goal. On the other, life happens, and I think it’s completely reasonable to continue pushing towards that goal without losing the plot of actually finishing this rewrite due to self-flagellation and perfectionism. I’m fairly happy at the forward momentum I’ve maintained, even while not committing to NaNoWriMo level discipline. This editing and rewrite process will continue to be the focus of this blog at least until the rewrite is done; I may have one week of aside about a gaming topic but the number of sessions I’m running and playing at the moment is quite low as everyone’s schedules begin their slow descent into hell the holidays.