Back to the other book.

I let my novel "I'M ONLY HUMAN sit for about half a year.  Meanwhile, I wrote another book.

So now, I'm going to let THE RELUCTANT WIZARD sit (while friends are critiquing it) and go back to the first book and finish it.

Four people read I.O.H. all the way through, and did some copy-editing. (Thanks Martha, Sunrise, Mark, and Linda.)

I decided that I would type the entire manuscript from scratch,  and all the changes into Word (from Scrivener) and change it from a 1st person to a 3rd person.

Spent ten hours yesterday entering 10,000 words, but in the end decided it isn't working.

Changing it to 3rd person isn't helping.  It isn't making it any better, it isn't sparking any beautiful lines of prose.  And it is a slog.

So, I decided in the last hour of the day to go ahead and copy the Scrivener version and transfer it, and make formatting changes.

So today I will start all over.  I'm hoping the process will go much quicker.

It wasn't all a lost effort though.  I began to see how I could re-structure the novel.  Actually, there are three different ways I can re-structure the novel.  Once I've got a base copy in hand, I'm going to try all three versions.

Incredibly complicated to change plot, because every scene affects every other scene.  But I'm going to be very daring and cut huge swathes of the book, and see how it reads.

That was the advantage I gained by sitting on it for a half year -- I'm far enough away from the first version that I can countenance being very harsh on the writing.   I'm willing to cut and change much more readily now.

This part of writing is hard work.  I wasn't looking forward to it, but now that I've started I'm determined to finish.