Meredith Mansfield, Author

I actually don’t mind revisions.  I do my best to turn my internal editor off during the first draft, so I expect to have to do a round or two of revisions.  Expecially if I’m writing fast, some things may just get left out or need to be expanded.  I often need to give more depth to my antagonists than they get in the first draft.  There’s its own kind of reward in seeing the writing and the story grow and improve during revisions.  Kind of like gardening, I guess.  Pull the weeds, prune judiciously, plant something new every once in a while, water and fertilize the rest.

But rewriting, where I actually have to discard what I wrote and start over, is more painful.  That’s where I am with two of my novels, though.  I still really believe in these stories, so it’s worth the pain to try to get them right.

This week, I’ve been formulating a plan of attack for my first novel, THE SHAMAN’S CURSE.  (It’s not really my first novel, but we’re not going to talk about that thing under the bed, okay?  It is the first to be good enough to try to get it right and get it published some day.)

I reread it after a about a year.  It wasn’t as good as I remembered.  I still really like the second half or so and that, right there, tells me what the first problem is.  It takes too long to get there.  So, that’s my first task.  I want to cut 10,000 words from the first half–15,000 would be even better.   Then I’ll see how far that goes towards fixing some of the other porblems I saw.  Wish me luck.  This is going to hurt.