Creating More Work

I started making notes today before I actually dive into the rewrite. I already had a list of changes to be made. In the middle of notes, I had an idea come up...again. This may mean half the book is gone. The main storyline - my characters goal and her journey to get there - won't change. Some of her backstory, however, has changed. It's so hard to blog sometimes when you have to be vague like this. I think it's a good change. It came up about halfway through the zero draft, but I pushed it aside. Then it popped up again three quarters of the way through and again, I bopped it in the head to send it back into the hole. When I told my bestfriend, she loved the idea! My husband, however, shot off with "but aren't just creating more work for yourself." Well, yes. I hadn't thought of it that way. I thought of it as making the story solid. Stronger. I outlined my behind off (oh, if only that would actually work - I think a lot more of us would spend time outlining like crazy) this afternoon and it works! It really works! With a little tweak here and there in some scenes, it's not really going to add that much. Scenes at the beginning need to be cut anyways so that we jump into the action. I'll finish the list tomorrow and dive in to the first third of the script. I'm really looking forward to it! It's the first rewrite so it's almost like a whole new story. We'll see if my enthusiasm is still here at the end of the second rewrite. I'm following Elana Johnson's advice and trying to get it done in 30 days! Ambitious? I think the most ambitious part is finding readers that will get the pages back to me in a timely manner. I'll chunk it as she suggests and see if that helps. Off to bed so I can get up and write more in the morning.

I'll leave you with an adorable picture of Lily (on the right) with her boyfriend Bubba during their playdate. I keep forgetting that the camera automatically date stamps it and is stuck on 2004, but this picture was taken only a few days ago.