Clean up time

I’m deep in the process of turning a rough first draft of the new novel “Falling Bakward” into a cleaner version suitable for other eyes. It was very discouraging yesterday, as I waded through the first two chapters and found so many horrible errors. But today, it was much smoother going. I find that when my first draft is written slowly, it also is rougher, and I had troubles when I’d started this project.

It’s nothing I can’t fix, but it’s also much nicer to write an apt paragraph the first time. And speaking of ‘it’s’, I made a horrible blunder with search and replace, and collapsed 170 instances of ‘it’s’ or ‘its’ into ‘its’. What a mind-numbing exercise to step through the novel, fixing each and every one of them!

The advantage of this part of the writing process is that I get to read the whole novel through, at a normal pace. It’s not something I get to do in the early stages. You know how you love to read and re-read a favorite book? Well, whichever novel I’m working on is my favorite one. Now I get to enjoy it.