Revising Meet the Larssons, Day # Who-Gives-a-Rat’s-Tokhes.

So last night I put a bullet in Chapter 13.  There will still be a chapter number 13, of course; something has to come after 12, and before 14, but it won’t be this one.  I think that of the 15 pages in the original chapter, I’ll keep maybe 5, heavily edited.

There are three points in the book that require a complete rewrite because of the changes to the story arc that I have mapped out; this chapter is the first of these points.  Once I finish the rewrite of this chapter, I’ll move more quickly for a while.  I hope.  I’m up to page 142 as of last night, and only that far because I gave up and brought pages on the train with me.

Here’s what the manuscript looks like these days:

Meet the Larssons manuscript, Jan. 15, 2009

The problem with doing so much rewriting is that I’m not sure it’s any better than what I wrote originally.

I went to a support discussion group for novelists on Monday night, which was very interesting.  It’s the fourth meeting of the group, so I was sort of coming in the middle.  I had the feeling everyone else had been an English major, which I emphatically was not, so I hadn’t read most of the books that came up in discussion.  It didn’t matter, though, and I mouthed off as blithely as I did when I hadn’t done the reading for classes in college.  It was fun to talk about writing with other writers live, face-to-face.  Not that there’s anything wrong with you people out here on the intertubes, it’s just that most of you are figments of my imagination.  The group meets once a month, and I’m already looking forward to the next meeting.

That’s it for today.  I just wanted to document that I continue to plug away.  I endure, which is more than anyone will be able to say about this ^(*&^*# novel.