Finally, finished shuffling events and people around for consistency, added new scenes and of course edited the boogers out of the very rough first draft. The second draft is complete. It's usually the longest of the redrafting exercises because almost everything gets revised. Going word by word through a manuscript used to be daunting, but I enjoy it because I expect it to be a lot of work. Now, the decision: jump right into third draft or go through G. Daniel Gunn's horror novel
Lost in the Woods once? I think I'll stay with
Locusts for a while. Have momentum and the characters still feel fresh in my head. The third run-through of any manuscript, for me, is always the most humbling, because every sentence and scene should be better than the first time through, so my expectations get skewed, because they rarely are. The lst draft was spent doing a lot of rewrites - rewrites which are, in many ways, first drafts themselves.
Still, the final product is cohesive and flows nicely, and to be honest it's a cool story. Now I just need to put my head down and edit, edit, edit.
Never let them see you write, I always say (a derivation of Jimmy Durante's advice to a young Burt Reynolds:
Never let them see you act, kid). You should revise, and revise, until the sentences and words take a back seat to the scenes you want them to paint in the reader's mind.
OK, waxing a bit poetic here. Time to get back to my writing.
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