Ideas often come to me in just little wisps of thought, like a slight breeze that you wouldn't ordinarily notice.

I have to pay attention. After already having done the rewrite of chapters 1 and 2, I had some further ideas and worked on those yesterday. I especially improved the character motivations in chapter 2, which has been a problem chapter from the beginning.

I decided I needed to introduce Nasim, the main terrorist protagonist in the third chapter, started to read the chapter, couldn't find much to change. By then, I was through for the day.

So really, didn't do what I set out to do, still stuck at 23 pages.

But just wandering around the house, (too cold and wet for my walk) a tiny little sliver of thought came to me--use only one of the flashbacks in the chapter, and save the second flashback for the next chapter featuring Nasim.

It's a thought that could have come and gone without notice, if I wasn't hypertuned to this kind of thing these days.

Ideas don't come solid and announced, they come as fleeting notions.

Often, they'll return. I had the idea of showing Cory's burns a few days ago, then forgot, and then yesterday remembered again.

It's interesting to me in this it is completely subconscious thought--given out of sequence, and that it doesn't announce itself firmly, but just as sort of "well, there's this..."


My original plan was to research for a couple of weeks and then give "Fires of the Djinn" a full rewrite. But it's been over a year since I wrote the first half of this book, so I decided I needed to familiarize myself with the story.

So I'm going through a full rewrite, adding 5 telling details per -page, THEN I'm going to do the research and add the elements as I come across them, and THEN do another (less intensive) rewrite.

Should take me between a month and a month and a half. I don't seem to be able to do more than about 25 serious pages of rewrites in a day. I don't know why it is so draining. But my brain just stops cooperating after 3 or 4 hours. I always think I'm going to take a few hours off and come back and do another 3 or 4 hours, but I rarely do.

Like I said, this work.

But really, I can see the improvements, to both the writing and the story. There is no excuse not to do it.