Still Revising
In my last entry I was sure my revisions were nearly done. I am occasionally overconfident. That was February, and it's now April. And I've just finished a major revision.But I haven't yet started the dual-POV rewrite I was talking about then. Lol. That may come, or it may not. Right now it's a question of whether I can bring Anna's character out enough through Evgenia's POV. If I can go back and draw that out more (because I didn't accomplish it in this latest revision), then it may not be necessary.And maybe the end of a big revision isn't the best time to decide whether to embark on a new one. The whole idea makes me tired.So if I didn't do the dual-POV, and I didn't flesh out Anna's character, then you may be wondering, what the heck did I actually revise? In this major revision I've been working on since February?Here's a list:
- Drawn out Evgenia's character and made her more consistent
- Almost completely rewrote the second half of the book
OK, that's pretty much it. That second one, mainly. Lol. I didn't approach it as a complete rewrite -- I thought I would be able to repurpose a lot of already-written stuff, and just move it around. That didn't turn out to be the case. There were bits and pieces I reused, for sure. But I rewrote way more than expected.Here's my concern: what I fixed was the plotting. The plotting of the second half was all over the place before. I'd brought in new villains; spent 4 chapters on a long, arduous, tedious march; let the girls linger for weeks in prison, under torture (to an extent I'm sure would've killed them in real life); and sent the girls hundreds of miles north to a new city for the climax.This revision, unsurprisingly, tightened things up. There's no march. There's no new villain - it's now Yurovsky from start to finish and everywhere in between, yay. The entire story takes place in a geographically tight perimeter, sending Evgenia and Anna back to the same town where they first encountered Yurovsky, and falling prey to the same character Evgenia pissed off early on.So it's much tighter, plot-wise. My concern is that in this revision, Evgenia and Anna spend less time together. And they need more time. In my previous drafts, they really bonded in jail together. Now that Evgenia's the only one who winds up in jail, it's missing that. So I've got to find a way to work that bonding time back in.Which, OK, shouldn't be that hard. Won't be that hard. I can do that. But if I go back through for that revision, I'm further putting off rewriting it in dual-POV. The thing is, I want to feel like I'm done before attempting dual-POV.And lord knows feeling like you're done with a manuscript is a long, tall order.