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I left a plot point hanging at the beginning of SWALLOWING DARKNESS. A big enough plot point that I couldn’t read it at the last Wolf Howl, because I needed to make those changes. I left it because I thought I might follow through with it, but in the end, it didn’t work. But it has hung over my head, so that when I typed THE END, I knew I had to change it. It was like finishing a marathon and realizing that I’d dropped my car keys somewhere along the route, and until I found them I couldn’t go home. It made the end, not really the end, because I knew even as I typed it, that I had more work.

Advice I give to new writers, and that I followed myself for years, and many books, is not to edit as you do first draft. Catch all that on the second draft. Good advice when you’re new, but now, I just hate finishing the book and knowing that things are hanging around outstanding that will have to be fixed. When I cross that finish line, I want it to be a true finish. In the interest of this, I edited the beginning of the next Anita book this morning. I’ve got the changes that were going to bug me the most smoothed out. The only change I’ll have to do after more research is the bit about phosphorus gernades. But I’ve fixed the things that were niggling at me, and would have needed changes not just at the beginning, but throughout the middle part of the book. That is no longer hanging over my head.

But part of this editing, is that I did something I’ve never done before. I started the next book, before the other was finished. I couldn’t seem to force myself to write more pages on Merry, but my muse and I weren’t done. So, I started on Anita. I got Merry done, and I’m well on my way to Anita. But, I had to stop working on it at some point and put everything I had into SWALLOWING DARKNESS. Not so I could do more pages a day, but so my imagination and my muse, and all of me could think, sleep, dream, of nothing but Merry. (Okay, I didn’t actually dream of Merry, but you get the idea.) I reached a point where even thinking too deeply about anything else was distracting from DARKNESS. So I gave myself over to that book, and only that book. That meant that I had a couple of hundred pages of a book that I hadn’t looked at in a while. So, I read it back over, and am editing as I go, just to get back in the swing of things.

I’ll be editing the next few chapters for police procedure, before I continue on. I’m pretty sure it’s not right yet, and some of the things that happen in these next chapters will potentially effect things deeper into the book, so now is the time to catch it. One of the reasons I can leave the grenades scene to be fixed later, is that nothing will build off of it. Rewrites get to be a bitch when the foundation that you’ve built the rest of book on has a crack in it. So, foundation first, then you build up. Now, having said that, if you are working on your first book I still think it’s more important to finish a rough draft, no matter how rough, first, before doing any rewriting. It’s so easy as a new writer to get caught up in perfectionism and polish those first few chapters until they shine, but you can get so busy shining up the beginning that you never finish the book. Finish the book, the rest can be fixed.

But for me, I need to crawl back into this book, and tuck it around me. I need to feel the sheets, clean and fresh against my skin. I need to remember where I was, and what we were doing. Mentally, it’s all there, but I don’t write from just the thinking bits of myself. I write from deeper in than that. So, this week to find my path again. This week to straighten up, and get things in order, before I open the spill gates and let chaos into my well-ordered fictional world. First to find out where I’ve been, then figure out where I’m going, and if it’s still the right destination, then the race is on. But this time when the race is done, I want to make sure my keys are in my pocket, and my car is waiting to take me home.