I sort of finished my second pass-through of World Leader Pretend. I got within the last 40 pages before my triathlon the weekend before last, and then when I returned from the triathlon, I found myself brain dead and disconnected from the novel. After two days of miserable writer’s block, I finally decided to just call the draft a wrap and start from scratch again.
For some reason, there’s nothing like a freshly-printed manuscript for re-motivation. I assuaged my guilt at the tree-killing by printing it on the back of the manuscript that my editor returned to me. (A decision I’m somewhat regretting, given that I keep having to find her pages on the back sides.)
Book I is reading really, really good. With all The Realm stuff moved out of Granite Mountain sequence, the section reads very smoothly and quickly. All the confusing time sequencing problems are gone.
Of course, the minute I got to Book II, where all The Realm stuff had been moved to, things got really clunky. I ended up stopping my re-read and spending the week fixing that clunk, hopefully it reads well. Basically, I tried making it so that the character introductions are immediately followed by some action by that character in The Realm. I ended up adding some material, and hacking up other material to make it work–I hope it reads well. I’ve been three weeks out from completing this thing for about a month now…