For the interested I remain deep in the guts of the second draft of Forever. Things are going well albeit a little slower than I would like.
Loose threads…
The difficulty of structural changes is that they are always more significant than you think. In this instance, a relatively simple change to a couple of characters’ relationship required significant rewrites through part one. It’s likely there will be more minor tweaks required in the subsequent parts of the story but nothing like as big as what I’ve had to do here. Still, I am happier with the flow of the first part and so it was probably the right call.
Slow and steady wins the day…
In terms of tracking to my project plan I’m still a bit behind. This is a little disappointing but not in a major way as it is certainly not a result of me not working enough as I’ve been chipping away at the project every day and more to do with poor estimation which is always a risk in setting yourself an ambitious deadline. That said I reckon I’m still going to finish at some point in the next six weeks. That’s good because I’m starting to get itchy feet syndrome where I want to move onto the next project.
A second pair of eyes…
As it is, before I can do that I will need to start giving thought to who I am going to get to test read the second draft. I don’t let anyone read stuff until the second draft, but like to have a different mix of readers at second and third draft as someone reading for the first time sees different things to someone re-reading. On The Scarred God I kept the readers quite informal, which was more about them doing me a favour than anything else, but this resulted in long time periods while the reading was underway. That’s a bit problematic with a novel where the longer the gaps between drafts the harder it is to keep the thing alive without massive rewrites. Couple this with my tendency to try to do different stuff with each novel and finding readers can become tough.
I’ll keep you posted on how I get on.