The Rewrites Begin

I have not, in the past, been a super big fan of rewrites.  Generally by the time I get around to them, I'm already starting to weary of the world I'm playing in.  I remember, back before I'd written my first long-format story (oh alright, novel, although I feel like a fraud saying that) wondering how an author could possibly make such basic mistakes as giving a character's birthday at one point in the series and then contradicting it later.  And then I wrote something longer than a short story, and came to realize that eventually it all just starts to overwhelm you, and you have trouble remembering what's on the page and what's only in your head.  And, moreover, eventually after all the re-reading and re-writing and editing-in-general, you begin to get very, very sick of the story, and just done with the damn thing, already.

Of course, in the past I've had a bad habit of editing-while-I-go, which means that by the time I get around to "re-writing", I've already read the thing more times than I can remember.  And I really shouldn't call it a bad habit, because for some people that works quite well.  For me, apparently, it leads to burning out on stories.

Which is why it's so interesting for me to begin the rewrites on Oathbreaker- I haven't read it over and over again: I just spewed it out onto the screen and moved on.  Occasionally I'd have to review a bit of what I'd written the night before, to remind myself where I was at in the story, but for the most part everything is still pleasantly fresh.  "Oh, I'd forgotten I wrote that!  That was clever."  (or, more often, "Oh shit that totally contradicts something I know I wrote later: better fix it.")

All this to say, I'm about 2500 words in to the re-writes, and am still feeling pretty excited about it.  Which is good, since I still have another 29 days of blogging left in this year's 366 project, and I might be able to utilize the one for the other.  Wheee!