I'm into the intensive rewrite stage for Of the City of the Saved..., and it's melting my brain. Yesterday I went through implementing a shedload of suggestions my editor had made: cuts here, rewordings there, changes of tense and other tweaks... in many ways, this part is more exhausting than the writing itself.
More exhausting, but also less demanding, in that I can do it even when I'm tired or not in the mood. To actually create stuff, I need to be a) reasonably awake, b) caffeined up, c) wholly uninterrupted, and d) in possession of a quality of mood I've never been able satisfactorily to define, without which -- even if a) b) and c) are fulfilled -- I just end up staring at the document on my screen and thinking "Black line make pretty pattern". Probably "inspired" would cover it.
Inspiration's still required, though. There are some much more major rewrites to be done -- events which need to happen differently, scenes to recast from one point of view to another, background detail to go through inserting or changing entirely. My characters' speech patterns, points of view and motivations need to be consistent. I need to smooth over some ugly infodumping in the early chapters. Roughly every third adjective has to go. That sort of thing...
Not that I'm complaining, you understand. I mean, I'm getting a novel published. My whole writing career has been leading up to this, (although I rather hope that I'll still be saying the same thing about my tenth novel, or the rest of my life is going to be something of an anticlimax). Just... well, it'll be nice to get something of a social life back once this one's over. That's all.
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