Starting over

After a lot of thought, I've decided to listen to the advice of my editor and rewrite my first novel. The whole thing. From scratch. Oy.

Yes, I'm really going to rewrite the whole thing. I've actually already started writing and finished the first two chapters. All things considered, it's going fairly quickly. While I say I'm rewriting the whole thing, I don't mean I'm making up a new story. The story is generally the same, and all the same characters will grace my pages, but I'm rewriting because, obviously after the rejection, something needs to change.

One of the biggest problems with my first novel, I think (as does my editor), was that when I started writing it I hadn't learned my own writing voice. I found it by the end, but the beginning of the novel has always suffered as I tried to keep it as close to its original form as I could. Though I wanted to keep what I could, ultimately I wrote it with a different style and no amount of tweaking could ever fix that. Starting over, using my old book as a guide more or less, I'm going to bring my book up to my new standards, and I think it will be better for it.

Of course, once I finish rewriting this, I'm going to have changed things. This could mean that I'll have to rewrite, or at least seriously revise, all my books. Or it could mean that when I finish my first novel and reread my second novel, I'll find that the voice sounds similar enough that I can ignore that and get back to trying to get published again. I'm not really sure.

All I know is I'm enjoying rewriting my book far more than I thought. I think it's been long enough that I can admit to myself that my first book, while it had good ideas, wasn't well written. I have the opportunity to fix that, and so I will.

It's still probably going to take forever and drive me crazy at points, but ultimately, I hope, it will all be worth it.

In several months anyway.