I finally overcame a huge bout of inertia and picked up the third draft manuscript of Missing Persons with an eye toward creating a fourth draft. I’d been frittering away my time doing other things over the past week or so, but now it’s time to get down to some serious work. To that end, I read through the first 230 pages on Saturday and Sunday. My agent and I have agreed that this section is essentially ready for prime time. I dropped in a few bread crumbs that allude to things that will come in the rewrites I’ll be making to the final 100 pages and did minor revisions for style and typos. I thought I was going to be bored with the book, but I wasn’t.
Now comes the really hard work—tearing apart the final section and putting it back together again. There will be at least one new chapter that gives voice to a character who previously has appeared only off page. My main task is to take a few nearly parallel threads that previously diverged and make them converge a little bit more. I have no idea how easy or hard this will be. The main hurdle is getting my mind to stop thinking about the story the way it is currently written as if that were engraved in stone. Giving myself permission to pull certain threads of the tale in a different direction.
Today is election day in Canada. Preliminary voter turnout set a record, which might be a good sign for turnout in general. It’s winter, after all—what else is there to do but vote?!
Was it just me, or were yesterday’s two football games boring compared to the ones in the previous weeks. Mismatches, I guess. Could be an interesting Super Bowl, though.
News From the Dead Zone has had a few updates over the past week or so. Check it out!
