Long time, no blog.

I've been derelict in my blogging duties: my excuses are many. At the end of August, I finished the last draft of WLP and shipped it off to my editor. As the rewrite had been a struggle, I decided to eschew all things writerly during the month of September, and to instead go on a long hiking trip with my good friends Anthony and Frank, spend time with relatives, and delve even deeper into my devious Utopian world.

Seeing as I wasn't writing, I found very little to say in my blog about the writing process...

I spent the first week of October refamiliarizing (yes, yes, I know that's not a word) myself with AVMP. It had been 5 months since I'd last worked on it, so I didn't quite know what to expect. I was fairly happy with the first half of the novel, and though there are some things that will need working on, I decided to leave it alone in my next rewrite. The second half of the novel starts off very, very slowly, and the end, as I mentioned in a previous post comes way too quickly. This is the part I've decided to focus on in the next draft.

Having decided where I needed to do work, I sat down this past Monday, and started working on it. This involved much pulling at the hair, and sudden urges to walk to the coffee shop, or clean the house, or run to the hardware store. Needless to say nothing got done until Thursday, when I finally managed to pump out a couple of meagre pages.

Once I get my head around it, though, this looks to be an interesting rewrite. I was emboldened by my experiences editing WLP for St. Martin's, and I'm able to cut pages with greater abandon. It used to be very hard for me to cut sections that were well-written but didn't fit well into the story line, but I yanked out 30 pages of AVMP today without so much as a blink. I'm hoping that the cuts will leave me with a more controlled novel than WLP. The whimsy of the novel will make it a very good read, but AVMP has more of a moral to it, and therefore, like a John Irving novel, it needs a firmer direction.