What a mess I've made

Thank God I'm off work this week. I plan to hole myself up for hours each day, finishing the rewrites on my book.

My original plan for the edits sounded straightforward. Take out this, replace with that. Oh, and strengthen the secondary characters. And get rid of the meandering sub-plot. And while you're at it, remove the extraneous clutter so the readers attention can focus on the real heart of the story - the girl whose disability makes her a target for the Nazis.

The process has not been straightforward. It's been methodical, in that I'm making one large change at a time, then rereading the affected chunks of text. But what's happening slowly and just as methodically is that the story's timeline has been goofed up. So today I looked like a kindergartener with my scissors and tape, literally cutting and pasting bits and pieces of scenes together while continually matching the altered scenes with dates on the vertical timeline I've drawn out and the dates on the 1938 calendar. Quite the unusual writing day, but worth it I hope.

I was able to identify a couple specific scenes I still need to create to connect the great swampy rewrite to the beginning and ending that already work well.

Here's to the pieces fitting together the way I plan.