Rediscoveries

I know I posted yesterday that revising the novel can be drudgery work, but today I really ought to point out that sometimes it's not.  To be honest, yesterday I was working my way through a scene that required significant rewriting, and while writing a scene is a joyful experience, rewriting the scene can be a little tedious.  This scene, in particular, I'm tempted to just take out of the book.  What's needed is either that, or the addition of a second scene later on to tie it into the story.  For those who have pre-read the story, I'm talking about the Atlantis scene, and it was admittedly skitchy in the first place.  I'd intended to get deeper into the scene, but midway through realized that the story needed to jump elsewhere, and so it just got left hanging, the reader asking "what the heck was that all about?"

I did finish re-writing the scene, anyway, and I'm still planning to write in the second trip to Atlantis to finish the issue off...at least for this book...later.  It's not a huge issue, though it's an interesting part of the story to me (the guy who, admittedly, already knows the story), but it's an important hook for a writing exercise I'm planning for the future.  I'll just write it and see if it deserves to stick around, I suppose.

In the meanwhile, I've gotten back to really enjoying the revising.  It's been a few weeks since I finished writing it, and if you add a few weeks to get to the time when I wrote the part I'm revising now, you've got enough space that my poor old addled brain has already forgotten some of it.  That makes it a joy to read, as I rediscovered a scene tonight that I'd entirely forgotten I wrote.  It's a nice one, I think, that shows both Matt and Crystal doing what they do best...smart-alecking away at each other. The one following is another cool one I hadn't thought about in a while, where two main characters finally come to terms with each other.  I like that scene a lot, which makes it even more fun to revise. 

I can't help but wonder if Stephen King, in his book On Writing, didn't have this little incentive in his mind when he said a new author should wait a few months before going back and revising it.  Yes, as he explained, the time between does provide for some forgetting of the text which in turn makes me more sensitive to problems while I'm re-reading the story, but it also brings a fair amount of joy once again as I rediscover the story. 

And so...back to the revising/rediscoveries.