Okay, okay, maybe I do have a little problem.
I finished the first major round of revisions on Glamour yesterday afternoon. No sooner did I finish writing the final scene than I starting going back into the manuscript to twiddle with some of the inconsistencies in some of the earlier chapters. You know, where in chapter 17, the girl is involved with one guy, but by chapter 41 she is involved with somebody else and didn’t even know whats-his-name. And since what happens to whats-his-name is a lot more important than whether or not they were ever involved, I’ve got to find and remove the earlier references. And then while I’m there, I realize that the moon phase for that particular day isn’t working, and I need to add two more short scenes to Part I. The list goes on and on.
My rewrite took 34 days (including 3 days off). I hate that it took so long, but it is what it is. Very little of the first draft (what I call the pre-draft) remains in this version. For this version, I leaned heavily on Larry Brook’s Story Engineering concepts to help me break the plot into more manageable sections, and a beat sheet to help me remember what was supposed to happen in each scene. For my next novel, I will definitely use that combination of techniques again. I think if I’d used them earlier, I could have eliminated the pre-draft version altogether.
My plan was to send this draft out to my early readers, but I just can’t do it. I need one more round of revisions to sort out the inconsistencies, correct the timeline, put in a couple more little foreshadowing references, and bring out some earlier characterization. Then, I promise; I’ll lay off for a month and let my early readers do their thing. Just one more round is all I need…
