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Now, with nothing but time on my hands, what am I doing with myself?
Preparing my second novel for publication.
This means a complete edit of the entire text: not just touch-ups to sharpen the writing or eliminate youthful excesses (although I’m doing a fair amount of that), but significant additions and alterations. The first act, which I completed last night, has been lightly expanded and refined. The midsection is ahead of me, and that’s the most daunting part of the job: there are three swaths of material here that make me cringe today, and these will have to be dealt with: either replaced with new work, or extensively revised.
Even some of the character names have been changed. It’s not a Saturday-afternoon project.
When I’m done, I doubt that there will be a single page that doesn’t show some revision, however small. Put the two versions side by side and I hope that they will look like siblings: the one eager and flush with some raw quality (after all, parts of it were good enough to see print in The North American Review and Kinesis, among other magazines), the other basically the same, sharing the stars in its eyes, but older and wiser and more sensible.
The graphic above is connected to the project. It’s a desktop picture I made all those years ago. The art, of course, is by Magritte. Don’t know why I didn’t attribute the quote, but I’m sure it’s written down somewhere; it’s an epigraph for the novel.
So -- procrastinating, yes I am... but slowly whipping this old lover into shape, that I am, too.
-- Freder.
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