The Art of the Rewrite

I finished the draft of MIXED KNOTS. I will let it sit for awhile while I work on a proposal for another series I started putting together last month. I am excited to work on it because it is all about things I love.

Rewriting MIXED KNOTS is going to be fun when I get to it. Maybe fun is the wrong word. I think exciting is better. It’s always interesting when I read the whole of what I’ve written. I never know if it will make sense or not until I look it over. I do know I have to add more to characters because now that I’ve finished the story I know more who they are and their motivation for what they did. It is always a challenge to try to blow life into characters on a page.

I look at my books as entertainment, so making them fun and light is my goal. I stopped reading two cozies recently because one had an urban setting and was simply too dark. I don’t want to read about drive by shootings. The other had something with dead animals used as a warning. It totally turned me off and I shut the book.

It may sound weird that I try to make the books fun since I’m writing murder mysteries, but the point of cozies is to make it more about the puzzle of figuring out who did while hanging out with a group of characters who are friends.

I have notes all over the place for the rewrite and yellow sheets with handwritten notes. It’s always a challenge to figure out the logistics of rewriting. I seem to always start out with the same plan - to read the whole thing from a hard copy and then rewrite. But it never works out. I get ants in my pants to start changing things and I start rewriting while I’m reading. Then I start moving around in the manuscript because early changes affect what happens later.

I really need to have a list of characters next to me with their names and appearances. I know that I changed people’s names while I was writing and I’d rather not have someone start out with short hair in the beginning and suddenly have hair cascading down her back. It helps if I associate the characters with a real person to keep their eye color straight throughout the book.

But rewriting when you have something to work with is much easier than starting with a blank screen.