I finally sucked it up and started doing what I’ve known that I needed to do for weeks: rewrite the ending of the novel. Not edit, but actually rewrite. The process is like, well it’s excruciating. Imagine that you were an artist and you painted a painting in, say, the year 2000. Let’s say that painting was a portrait of a girlfriend you had at the time. Now, let’s say five years later, in the year 2005, you no longer had that girlfriend, that instead you had a completely different life with another woman, and that in fact you were now married to that new woman, and had a child, and really didn’t want to revisit the relationship with the other, more previous, woman.

So, stick with me here, it’s 2005 now, and some art dealer from New York pays you a buttload of money for the portrait of the ex-girlfriend, and you’re really happy to have the portrait of the woman off your hands, and some extra spending money to boot. But there’s one catch, and the catch is this: you have to make some changes to the painting. When you agreed to give the dealer your painting, you sort of waved this off as inconsequential, but now that you’re staring at this portrait of your ex-girlfriend, you suddenly realize something that you hadn’t thought of before--YOU DON’T REMEMBER WHAT YOUR EX-GIRLFRIEND LOOKS LIKE. You burned all your photos of her to stave off your new wife’s jealousies, and there’s just no way you can paint her unless you, well, unless you see her again.

OK, you see where I am at now. There are problems with visiting ex-girlfriends. For one, the ex-girlfriend surely doesn’t look the same, she’s changed, so when you redo the painting it’s going to be all f***** up, and for two, if you get too close to the ex-girlfriend, divorce, amongst other things, awaits.

Now, to tie things up, here’s what’s happened to me. You see, I was having a very hard time getting into the ‘space’ of the novel in order to rewrite it, so what I did was, I revisited the thing that caused the novel in the first place, this online game called Utopia. Now if you know me, you know that online gaming is my alcohol, once I’ve started drinking from it I can’t stop. My every thought, even when I’m not online, is the stupid game. So here I am, back in the ‘space’ of the novel, and it’s working, I care more, I’m writing new pages, but my wife, she’s going to f****** kill me, because every spare moment I can possibly muster, I spend down in the basement playing Utopia, rather than cleaning the house, or changing the diapers, or walking the dog, or any of the other myriad of things that a responsible parent and dog owner should be doing…

Labels: Writing Process

I did my editing at Powell's today, which, needless to say involved the purchase of some books. I got away pretty cheap this time, having retrieved a couple of well-worn paperbacks at low prices. Dune, Frank Herbert's classic SF novel about the politics of retrieving an all-important commodity from a desert planet, has been calling to me of late for obvious reasons. (I'm sure I read this at some point in the far off past, but as usual my memory is a stranger.) I also picked up Arundhati Roy's A God of Small Things, mostly on account of A. Roy's current activism, which I greatly admire.

I made it through my read-through. Things are starting to shape up a bit. Part II read much better this time around. There will be some minor changes to Parts III, IV, and V, including joining Part III and IV into a single part, but these changes are mostly structural and don't involve a lot of rewriting. The final part, as suspected, does need some additional writing due to the altered plot, but now I've pinpointed exactly where the writing needs to take place and what it needs to say, so I'll be able to do the work without feeling so lost in the text.

I'll be starting a third draft tomorrow. After this draft, I'll need to go through the entire manuscript one last time to fix some tense issues that I never resolved, and then, hopefully, mercifully, I'll be through with this thing so I can get my royalty check ;)

Labels: Writing Process

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...