Musings

Last week I cleared the boards of a lot of small demands on my time. Critical Mass met on Wednesday so I was done with the reading and writing critiques. Wild Cards is on hold until the other writers come back in with their rewrites. Since the interstitial has to weave between the other stories it helps if George and I can get a feeling for what is needed. I’d rather rewrite once. The screenplay I’m writing with Mike Cassutt was back in his hands. This sudden lifting of burdens meant that I could finally take a look at the second book in my series tentataively titled ON THE EDGE.

The discovery that I had a flair for writing in first person had made me want to tackle a rewrite on this book. I delivered it last August 5th, and for a variety of reasons my editor hasn’t had a chance to look at it in an in depth manner. I knew when I delivered I wasn’t satisfied, but I was two months late, and being late on a deadline really makes me crazy. I also knew I couldn’t fix it right then. I was too close to it. As the months passed I realized one problem was the number of view point characters — 7. And I also felt that the theme and focus of this book was being obscured by so many competing view points.

I had thought about casting the entire book in first person, but that seemed a daunting task, and then George suggested that I treat it like the Wild Card book. My main character’s arc is the interstitial, and the other characters written in third person will orbit and comment on him and his story. I thought it sounded like a good idea, but I was really scared to start. That’s actually the worst moment for me as a writer. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new project or a rewrite I circle the desk and computer like a wary hound faced with it’s first sight of an armadillo.

Friday I finally took the plunge. And it’s going really well. I’m 35 pages into the rewrite. As I’ve been reading it seemed like the scenes were more sketched in than actually fleshed out, but by writing the Richard sections in first person I’m deepening the experience, and description just flows from that. In fact it’s going so well that I skipped riding on friday so I could keep writing. Wonderful. I love my job.

Melinda

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 7:39 am and is filed under writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.