I finally, finally, FINALLY passed a milestone today…one that’s been on the docket of “shit-to-just-get-done” for a long, long, looooonngggg time:
I finished the actual rewrites for this second draft of my novel. Yes, my FIRST novel. It is only my first…but it is still DONE. And, again, I have to qualify that with “not DONE done, but done” – I still have to type in all those rewrites, and then I still have to do one more pass on the whole manuscript. BUT. This was by far the most major portion of this rewrite, a close second being the step before it where all the said rewriting was planned out.
I am very much looking forward to now being done with typing up all these rewrites and putting the whole thing all back together again…because I’ll get to actually READ the damn thing for the first time in, man…six months I think? Gotta be longer than that. Maybe even 9 months. Enough time for a friggin baby to pop out. Jesus. And, no, I’m not going to compare writing a novel to birthing a baby so you can withhold the eye-rolling, dear sassy reader.
My new glasses came today! Oh praise be to baby g. Good lord. Those converse glasses from 10 years ago were not cutting it, and right now is the worst allergy season of the year for yours truly, i.e.- contacts weren’t cutting it either. And these new frames look DOOOPE. Same silhouette as my last pair, but slightly different finishes – most notably the color, which is a light brown. I was a bit nervouse that they wouldn’t look good…but they DO. They look great. And wife-approved.
I’m working through the weekend. I have a novel to write up and then proof-read. I do believe there is one section of the novel which is going to need one more top-to-bottom rewrite, but we’ll see. My gut tells me it’s going to read slow and overly complicated, and if that’s the case, I have ideas on how to scale it back and still be an improvement over what it was in the first draft. But see, that’s why I’m so excited to be really, truly done with this phase of the rewriting process – because I can step back and get a sense again of the novel as a whole.
Rewriting is still so freaking challenging for me. This process of assessing a story as a whole unit, identifying parts of that whole that aren’t fitting well…then deconstructing the whole into these small parts, and then those small parts into even smaller parts, fixing those parts and then reassembling it all back together into a whole single piece again…it’s exhausting, and I find myself getting lost quite often fixing those tiny little parts.
It’s mostly a sense of “I haven’t done this before” and because I’m so micro during the fixing, I have no sense of whether it’s actually fixing anything on the macro level. I’m hoping, praying, with time, practice and feedback that it will all start to make more sense. And get faster. Oh, please lord, let it get faster.
But, I checked off that “x” today on my master list of rewriting steps, and that felt good. So good.
I also got a shit-ton of Netflix work done today, thank you baby jesus. Thursday was a rough day. Today was not. Today was wonderful. Gonna make tomorrow wonderful too.
How was your day?