How I learned to stop worrying, and love the rewrite.

Well, maybe not love the rewrite.  But I have come to acknowledge the importance of it, and even -- sometimes -- just for awhile -- even like it a little.

First of all, not all rewriting is the same.  I think of rewriting in two ways.

The first is the selection of words, the phrasing, the grammar, all the different matters of style.

But the second kind is the actual framework of the book, the thinking that underpins it.  The plot, the architecture, the story.

The style can always been fixed, or improved.   How polished it is, how well it flows.

The framework is a bigger problem.

Ironically, it is when I have a structural problem that I'm forced to rewrite, and when trying to deal with the structural problem, I end up working on the style as well.  The bigger the structural problem, the more I rewrite.  So weirdly enough, I believe sometimes that problem books end up with more polished writing than books that don't have those problems.

I think there is some give and take here -- what you give up in freshness and spontaneity, you gain in polish and style.  The trick is not to give up too much of the former, in order to gain the latter.

I definitely write in two different ways; the easy and the hard.  Star Axe, Deviltree and Faerylander were hard, for instance.  Snowcastles, Icetowers, Led to the Slaughter, and the Vampire Evolution Trilogy were relatively easy.

I'm not sure that one is better than the other, just that the process seems to be very different.  (Obviously, I prefer the easy.)


I think I finally have a version of Faerylander that I like enough to publish.  I have about 20 Cobb's Bestiary entries to write.  Then I want to give it a full editing job, and polish it.

But the basic framework is there.

There is a whole lot of invention in this book.  I put a lot of effort into it.  So I think in the not too distant future I'll be ready to say it's done.

So I have 4 books that are more or less finished.  One is currently being edited and will need a cover, but the cover will be fairly easy.  One is finished and just needs a cover.  One needs to be edited and has a cover.  One needs to be edited and also needs a cover.

That leaves about 3 books out of the ten I've written that still need work.  As well as the two books that I wrote 30 years ago that I still think need some work.  

I think after I finish Faerylander, I'll be ready to tackle Ghostlander. 

Anyway, I seem to be on track.