Category: Uncategorized

I finished the first draft of SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT this evening.  Hooray!

It’s very exciting, typing up the final pages of a manuscript.  Granted, this is only the fourth time I’ve done it.  But it’s still a happy thrill.  I hope it never loses its appeal.

There’s still so much work left to do on this thing…like make it coherent, and readable, and perhaps even find a way to make it not suck.  But that’s rewriting.  Rewriting is almost always less taxing than writing.  At least now I have something to hammer on, rather than a blank page.  But that’s a task to tackle another day.

I’m nearing the end of the first draft of Something More Than Night.  I’ve just begun what will be, I think, the final scene.  I’m very pleased.  So now I’m at that phase where I look ahead to the second draft and think: ugh.

This book is very different from my other novels, not only in terms of story, characters, and world, but also in terms of how I’ve approached the writing.  I outlined this one just as much as the others—the 4′ x 3′ corkboard in my office is completely covered with notecards—and yet this book lent itself to far more improvisation and in-the-moment reinvention along the way. Which sounds strange, when I hear myself say it, because I hewed more closely to the outline for this book than I did to any of the original outlines for the Milkweed books. 

But the rewriting for this second draft will have a different focus, a different goal, than it did on any of the Milkweed books.