Writing

Today I wrote, yesterday, too. Not my blog novel, Novas, but Runners Book Two. The first draft was finished about 12 years ago and I have been working on it ever since. Runners originally was a thousand pages, but it was too thick for one book. So I chopped it into three parts. First part, Runners Book One, was published in January, after over ten years of revisions. This weekend I went through Runners Book Two, the entire book, 590 pages. It needs so much more editing, but hopefully no more revisions.

It's what I want to do, tie up my literary life into the imaginary lives of Jonathon Perone and Jennifer Carling. They breathed through my whole weekend inside my mind. Their relationship trotted in and out of scenes of five months of their lives, sometimes for hours of reflection as I tried to grasp what on earth I was trying to do 14 years ago when I started the book.

Now comes the hardest part. Line editing each page, looking for repetitious words, misspellings, phrases with no purpose. How well it ties together. The one thing I realized reading it was how incredibly intense it is. It would not be possible for real people to be as intense, too much space between the real moments in a real life. No space between their moments.

Which is the problem with line editing. Every time I try it, I get caught up in the moments as they interwine their lives, and even though I invented them, they seem to have a life of their own beyond my imagination. Thus the line editing is scrapped after about five minutes.

This is the hard part. I put more intensity and real moments in 590 pages than I can remember having in my own life. Is that what writing is all aboout?