The left side of the brain is an exacting bastard.

I let the critical parts of myself into the process last night.

And immediately had doubts about my book.

Two things are for certain.

1.) A rewrite is unavoidable.

2.) I hate rewrites.

I love the creative process of a first draft, but that only gets me halfway there.

I got home early afternoon, driving straight from Florence in about 3 hrs and 15 minutes. I drove like a maniac. I not only started passing cars, I started having fun passing cars. Some of my passes were dubious. You have to understand, I NEVER do this.

For some reason, I was a speed demon yesterday, and if felt good.

Anyway, got home and Linda had bought the Word Program. Did you know that Mac's don't have a word processing program built in? Anyway, Word has a novel writing feature and I transferred The Reluctant Wizard onto it. I have been trying to work with Scrivener, but was struggling with it. I think Word's 'Help' feature is much better. Aaron came over and helped us get it set up.

Found out right away that I was about a ten thousand words shorter than I thought I was. The novel was already probably on the short end, even for a young adult. Yet I felt it was a complete story.

Then, I started getting critical of the writing.

The doubts set in. As I spent the hours of getting the novel formatted correctly, I started feeling a kind of despair. "Never mind," I told myself. "Give yourself a week and come back to it."

But, strangely, at the end of the day, my fondness for the characters and the story were what I came away with. I'm going to set about trying to make it better. I've decided the shortness of it is actually to my benefit. My writing can always benefit from filling out.

Especially the beginning.

I kind of object to the new mantra that you have to "Grab" the reader. So many great books I've read that start off slow and leisurely. I don't think you need a "Shot in the Dark" opening, and in fact I get kind of annoyed sometimes with the concept.

However, agents and publishers are only going to look at the first few pages, so I'm sort of having to give in.

Last night, I had the realization that I could have a more "active" beginning after all. Introduce the two dangers, the villains, the Big Bads, in the first few pages. The moment where everything changes for young Lore Stripling and the sleepy town of Elbow.

One of the features I've liked about this book is the linear nature of it, the straight beginning to end progression, and the fact it has one viewpoint character throughout.

Fine -- that is still the basis of the book.

But it doesn't mean I can't add other viewpoint characters here and there, or have things happen elsewhere or at another time. As long as I don't mess with the basis of the book.

The more exotic aspects of the book -- which any fantasy reader is going to be looking for -- are probably going to need to be brought in, from the outside.

The beginning I have in mind, introduces some major, more dangerous characters earlier, but doesn't disrupt the story as far as I can see.

So I'm not done with the "creative", right brain part after all.

I like my right brain -- it's kinda crazy.




Oh, without a word processing program, I've been writing my entire book as a draft of a blog entry.

I know, crazy.

But it worked really well. I could find myself in any part of the story I needed to be, simply by scrolling. All in one place, always in the cloud. I could even write on the blog when I wasn't hooked onto the intertubenet, as long as it was on my screen before I started.

But it's single line, doubt paragraph line, with no indentation. So that all has to be corrected.

I think, after six years of writing this blog every day, that I'm extremely comfortable with the format. Maybe I'm just trying to fool myself into thinking I'm just writing another blog. Easy peasy. I'll probably continue doing that.