Infinimata Press: Projects: First Round Draft Choice Dept.

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2012-10-29 12:00:00-04:00 No comments

Flight of the Vajra, draft 1, finished, as of 7:30 or so Sunday night.

Now the hard part.

First, I have to survive the hurricane — I've buttoned everything up in anticipation of it — and then I can sit down and begin the rewrite process. I've mentioned before what this will entail.

It felt downright strange (in a lovely way, really) to type THE END and just before it see words you had ruminated about in one form or another for months. The emotional end of the book, rather than the logical end, was what mattered most, and while I had sketched out a general route to get there, I wanted to make discoveries along the way. I've found there are some discoveries that can only be made between writing one line and the next, that simply cannot (at least for me) be teased out at an outline level.

The rewrite process is going to involve a lot of bookkeeping, as I also noted. I always felt a little uneasy about accruing a note pile that was at least a big as the book itself — that always seemed like a misdirection of energy — but I also have the feeling many of the things I jotted down are redundant or no longer valid.

Some of them were "blind alley" notes, things I wrote down when it seemed possible the story might veer in a different direction but ultimately never did. They won't get used, of course, but it's fascinating to page through them and see hints of all the different things that could have been. But that doesn't mean they have to find a home in the work somewhere. Not every director's cut is longer.