Wrestling with words, instead of dancing with them.

Wrote this yesterday:

I have one final chapter to write in this new rough draft.

As I said in yesterday's writing, I'm finally learning to never say "final."

Which draft is this?  Who knows -- it's a constant process.

These last few days, I've forced myself to sit down with a fixed goal.  It was more like wrestling with words, instead of dancing with them.  But sometimes that's what you have to do.

Overall,  the biggest problem I probably have now is having an inconsistent tone.  I sort of darkened the whole plot earlier in the book, so now some of the later chapters seem lighter than they should be.  The only way to fix this, I think, is to read (and gulp, rewrite) the entire book in one day, so I can keep the tone consistent.

I try to limit full re-readings to keep it fresh.  Dipping into the manuscript at random lets me work with improving it without taking away from the freshness.

I've tried putting little warning flags throughout the manuscript, make the situation Cobb and his friends find themselves in steadily more dire.

The whole second half of the book hasn't been worked on as much, because it's mostly action scenes, without all the plot mechanic problems of the first half of the book.

(I'm definitely going to try to outline my next book to avoid some of those plot mechanic problems.)

I'm trying to be patient.  Keep working on this thing until I can't make it any better -- within reason.

I'm still hoping for the "Perry Mason" turbo charge twist, something that makes it much better.  That happened between the the last draft and this draft, so I'm going to assume it can happen again.

In the meanwhile, there is plenty of rewriting to do to upgrade the quality of the writing.  Every few pages there is a line I really like; which I think is original and fresh.  Getting one of those lines in every page would help.  Getting one of those lines in every paragraph would help more.  Having every sentence be like that would make me a Master ...heh.

Still want to enliven the language with 'telling details' and still want to visualize every scene as if it's a movie and I'm feeling and seeing and touching and smelling and hearing the whole bloody scene.

It's more of a book now -- but I'm going to just give myself the task to improve it twice as much again.

Patience and maturity.

Whatever.