The Rewrite Shuffle
For the better part of the last two weeks I have been writing and rewriting the lead up to the end of my novel project “Dark Moon”. As I have talked about before, I stripped out what would have been 30,000 to 50,000 words of story arc around the 100,000 word mark in order to keep the story under 175,000 words. Current projections have this novel coming in under 140,000 words.
This task however of getting to the end of the story has proven difficult. More difficult than I first thought.
To reiterate what I have said before, the story that was stripped out was not essential to the novel. It was a lot of rehashing, fleshing out some items that I wanted to better explain and make more clear, but it was nothing crucial to the overall story. The problem however has been that I had all that stuff all so flushed out in my brain that when I sat down and began to condense and rewrite it into a shorter version to speed things along, everything became a muddle.
I noticed that right away. Then when I rewrote it the first time everything was happening too fast and made even less sense. Now I have a better handle on it. The first part of the lead up to the ending is at least to a point where I can say I am satisfied with it as a draft. Now I am working on the section of the story that ties this bit to the ending.
It has been a struggle. But things are still moving along. I have wanted to jump forward to the end and just skip all this and come back to it later. But I have fought that urge and it seems to be paying off.
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