Reworking

For the past two nights, I've been doing something, writing-wise, that I've never done before, and that is tearing out scenes, rewriting them, and MAYBE sticking them in somewhere else.

Of course I've rewritten scenes before, I just recently pulled some scenes out (something I don't do a lot, unfortunately), and I've added new scenes. But last night, I knew I needed to buckle down and start finishing (start finishing? Odd and possibly incorrect pairing of words...) a few certain scenes in TOSOL.

The reason that this problem even exists is because I write out of order. While pacing-wise, the scenes were in the right places, they were almost the wrong scenes in the right places. My main character degressed from the maturity she gained halfway through the novel because I never revised the third training scene. In others, information was repeated or confusing.

This has happened before, but usually I'll just type away at them, cutting and rewriting until it seems like I've fixed the problem. But in order to fix this one, I needed to see all of the related scenes at one time so I could pick and choose what I needed from each one, as I knew a few would have to be combined with one another. I copied and pasted all of the specific scenes into one document, printed that out, and then tried to figure out what I needed. Once I knew the requirements for the first scene (which included much less from the original first scene- that'll be going in the third- and a ton from the fourth), instead of copy and pasting from the same document, I just retyped the whole thing. I'm so grateful I did this- copying and pasting allows me to be lazy, and I realized as I re-typed that if I had done the first option, I would have missed fixing a lot of tiny things.

Right now, I'm still trying to fix those scenes, but it's getting closer to the end. I'm actually kind of on a deadline right now: I really want the free proof copy of this version of the book, and one of my readers will be sans internet after the 26th of this month, so I need to get it to her before then. Rush rush rush...