Rewrites always trick me . . .

I’m currently working on the second draft of Salt & Ash and I’ve fallen into a trap that seems to lure me in and catch me every time I write a novel. I finish the first draft and then get incredibly excited about the developmental edits. As a massive stationary nerd, I am at my happiest when I’m surrounded by loads of highlighters and post-its. I print the manuscript, do one read through with some high-level notes and then start the developmental edits by attacking the manuscript with all the highlighters and all the scribbled notes.

When I finished this attack on Salt & Ash, I felt genuinely happy. I’d managed to fix the plot holes, strengthen the characters and enhance the world building. Now all I had to do was to do the rewrites, which I smugly thought would take me a couple of weeks . . . just like my last novel and the one before that and . . . you get the idea.

How wrong I was!

Why I imagined that 324 pages of highlighted, scribbled over text would be a quick rewrite process baffles me! After two weeks, I am only just on Chapter 6, partly due to limited time, but mostly due to the fact that there is a LOT of rewriting to do, particularly across the first 15 chapters.

Am I feeling intimidated by the sheer volume of work in front of me? Absolutely! But there’s also something intensely satisfying about finally writing the words that are likely to stay in the final draft (hopefully).

There’s a good few weeks of rewrites ahead before I then move on to line edits, but I’m going to attempt to be more slightly more realistic about how long this will take . . . maybe.

Either way, we’re aiming for a completed manuscript to query with agents by the end of September - pray for me!