I've been training for five months to do a triathlon, and on Sunday I finally did it. I was surprisingly fast, considering I never quite got rid of the spare tire. My race report is posted on the Beginner Triathlete website

I'm not sure where I left off--from a blogging point-of-view. I'm now in the midst of my second pass-through with the novel. The first pass-through, I essentially ripped out the old feather stuffing that the publishing house was allergic to: removing characters and bad plot offshoots that didn't really go anywhere. The end result: 150 pages ripped out and fed to the dust mites.

This pass-through, I'm putting in newer, synthetic material, compact and hypoallergenic: interweaving the remaining characters, tightening the plot, removin the spaces. The last part of the book, Book 6, is currently getting a drastic makeover, and I may even change the ending.

This is an entirely new writing process for me, cutting out wide swaths of my writing, and, although it's been hard for me to get fully behind, emotionally, since so much of my emotion is wrapped around my second book (NEGLECTED! ROTTING!) I'm glad that I'm doing it, as I think, after six years devoted to the process of writing, I'm just now starting to understand what the word editing, actually means. It's amazing to me how much time and effort I've put into writing, and how little I've actually understood what editing means.

I finished my first go-through of World Leader Pretend yesterday. I cut about a quarter of it. Most of the cuts involved cutting out the storyline of two characters, and keeping them on the periphery. There was also some significant cutting of some of what can only be described as a "chase scene," where one of the character's spends far too much time trying to identify a body near the end of the novel.

Incidentally, I just saw the movie Adaptation, which was good except for the last 20 minutes, which was mostly superfluous chase scene stuff. What is it about long chase scenes? They really suck.

I'm now moving into a rebuild, where I need to add some stuff back into the story to fill in the holes left by the cut. I'm kind of nervous about doing it, since I haven't written material for the book in about two years, and since I changed my style so much in the second novel.

In general, I'm feeling a litte queasy about the edits. My biggest concern is that the writing was really strong in many of the sections that I cut, and while it made sense to cut it, from a plot perspective, I'm worried that I'm left with a lot of not-as-strong writing in the last 3 books of the novel, and that this flaw is really exposed.

(I seem to be doing a lot of complaining today) I'm also just chomping at the bit to get back to A Very Minor Prophet. It's hard to be working on a novel you felt done with a long time ago, when a novel that feels more and more relavant by the day is sitting there un-worked on.

Of course, one of the worst things you can do when working on a novel is be in a hurry, so I have to do my best to keep the frustration from entering into my work, otherwise WLP is going to turn into a giant hack job.

Labels: Writing Process