moon’s accomplice

So I’m working on this novel. If you’re friend or family, you may know something about it, or even have read one of the many, many earlier drafts.

And I’m really happy with it, but holy cow, is it hard to rewrite a novel. Because you’ve got to manage it all in your head while working with smaller parts of it.

I was trying to think of a comparison to make to Wayne, who is a software developer. And actually, it’s a lot like working on a large program with pretty of submodules and pieces, because when you change one section you need to figure out how it affects all the other pieces. And there’s repeated objects, or other things, and I think a little of those like global variables, so to have to make sure they’re declared before you can start using them. (As you can tell, I spent some procrastination time on thinking this out.)

Something I’m doing, which is probably rather insane of me, is that I transferred the book, which was in a Word doc, back into Scrivener. That’s because I have been severely reordering the scenes. I printed it all out, and went through that hardcopy with pen marking up some stuff and shuffling it around until it was all in the order I wanted it in.

Part of that is the process for dealing with what I’m comparing to global variables. That’s a thing that gets referenced more than once over the course of the book. Because you want it set up right the first time it appears and then for details to unfold about it in an order that makes sense and keeps building on the thing.

So, as some may know, I’ve been working on a particular book for a loooong time. Looooong time. It’s the first in a fantasy trilogy and this manuscript has undergone so many convulsions and rewrites that I was getting to the point where I was worried I’d kill it if I went much further. Based on some solid feedback from an interested agent, I started wrestling with it again and performed some major surgery: excised a number of points of view (which will end up in Book 2), removed some extraneous (but charming!) bits misguidedly intended as textual amuse-bouches between chapters, and switched one point of view from 3rd person past to 1st person present.

I was encouraged, but worried that the patient might not have survived the surgery. So I dumped it on my writing group, whose members rose whole-heartedly to the challenge, and we critted it last Saturday.