Daily "Fateplay" rewrite journal, Day 11.

I may have stumbled across a way to rewrite that I can live with.

The systemic method is necessary first. Picking a reasonable number of pages per day to work on, then going through it sentence by sentence, then thinking about it, and then coming back.

But I've found myself drifting backward as well, doing little embellishments or cuts or changes. I do this by just sort of drifting through the manuscript. landing on a paragraph, reading it, seeing if there is anything that can be improved, then drifting to another paragraph and so on.

The point is to spend the day doing it. Just as I realized that the point of spending a whole day on 2000 words of a first draft wasn't to get it all down as fast as possible, but to give myself all that time to think and wait and write when it happens, and then think about it some more.

Time is the crucial factor. Dedicate the whole day to the rewrite.

I do a lot of daydreaming, and much of the daydreaming has nothing to do with the story at hand, but everyone once in a while an idea pops up. The main thing is to prime the pump, to tell my subconscious, "OK, what would improve this?"

Sometimes I get an improvement that is so small and seemingly inconsequential that spending an hour drifting, almost asleep, seems like a high price. But if I get enough of these small improvements, maybe they add up to enough.

I go back and forth about whether I like the book, which is a function of rewriting. If I don't rewrite, I always like my book, because I enjoy writing the first draft so much.