Doing it right in the first place.

Now that the final rough draft of Faerylander is done, the lessons are pretty clear. 

Avoid the fucking problems in the fucking first place.  I've finally got this book the way it should have been all along, if I'd known what I was doing at first.  It was ten times harder to get it into shape by not having thought it through.

I can't fault myself too much.  When I started this book 3 years ago, it had been 25 years since I'd been serious about writing.  No surprise that I went about it wrong. 

Wrong tone, wrong plot, wrong characters, wrong everything.

By the time I got to writing Death of an Immortal, I was fixing problems before they got out of control, foreseeing things that needed to be done.  But with Faerylander, I just started writing and wrote myself right into knots.

Anyway, I think I've fixed it.  So this is the structure I go with, no matter what.  No more moving around of scenes and chapters.

I'll never do this again.  Any book that requires this much rewriting to make it work will be abandoned.  I can just go on to the next book.

But Faerylander was worth saving, I thought.  (Not to mention doing something silly like writing a couple of sequels that only make sense if the first book exists. )

I still want to spend a week or so going through it and doing some polishing.  The book is little less than 100K words, so I managed to winnow about 30% of the length by cutting and consolidating, which is good.

The editors won't be ready for about six more weeks, so I can go back to writing Ghostlander. 

When they are ready for Faerylander, I'll give it one more go through and that's it.  One way or another, this book is done.

I think it's a good book, now.  Only one chapter still bothers me, and I have the six weeks to try to find a solution to it.