It's amazing what a two month gap between finishing a novel and getting back editorial comments from your agent can do. Sentences that you thought were right become tortured convolutions of sub-clauses you'd normally expect in a warranty. Plot twists you thought were only slightly devious are incoherent and so impossible to detect it makes the narrative clunk and grind. Research is shoddy. And these are just things I noticed, let alone the things my agent/editor picked up on. So, chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, I am taking a scalpel to the text and refining it. I also invented a new twist to add into the plot and I think the uncovering of such extra vision is what makes a rewrite less of a grind than it could be. Live and learn.
More next week.
Try not to do the stupid things that stupid people do.
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