Kickass Writing Day...

... or rather, a kick ass revising / planning day.

Yesterday, I mean. 

I continued to reread and rethink Perils, and blah, blah, blah. Loving it even more, and both the overarching structure and the in-the-trenches small stuff are coming clearer. Also, I'm seeing pieces in relationship to one another -- characters, back story, relationships, mystery, real threats vs. perceived threats -- so that the rewritten version should have a much better shot at unity of effect.

Consider the cascade of conflict, for example. Conflicts exist on various levels -- internal, amongst friends, and externally -- but while rethinking the external threats yesterday, I realized the nature of one of the primary threats -- the seeming villain, at least during one section of the book -- was out of step with the struggles examined by the rest of the story. While rereading the "villain" sections yesterday, I thought, These are cool, but they don't fit... and shortly thereafter, I realized why. Other than the villain scenes, the internal and external struggles, though wildly different, all touch on a couple of central themes that wrote themselves into the narrative.That's why they didn't feel right.

This is the magic of the rewrite, of course. I don't think about stuff like that during first drafts -- or I try not to, anyway -- and it just writes itself in. But during planning and rewriting, it's much easier to see stuff like that, and even though it signals a lot more work (What? Rewrite the villain and all his scenes? And fit them back into the story?), it's a thrill, knowing I've uncovered what would have been a real weakness in the story.

All right. Enough blabbing. Time to get back to work. At very least, I want to finish going through Perils of the Road before I receive the editorial letter for the other book. In a perfect world, the letter wouldn't arrive until I've had time to knock out an outline for a restructured Perils. We'll see...