Straightening out the story

First off, let me explain that this blog post will now be weekly, on Friday mornings unless the world caves in.  I've taken this decision because I was spending as much time finding topics for blog posts as I was planning new writing, and that couldn't continue.

So what am I going to do with the time that not blogging every day frees up?  I'm going to go through all my old novels, re-edit them, and damned well get them sent out.  When I counted up a few days ago I realised I was writing novel number twenty six, and apart from one, they're all sitting on the shelf unsubmitted.  Must try harder.

I'm working on Auroradawn right now, one of my young adult novels, and having a lot of fun re-organising it.  This is the novel that got taken off the slushpile by Random House Children's Books back in 2005, but in the end didn't get bought.  At the time I was pretty devastated by that, and I just stuffed the file back into my cupboard.  But that's nearly a decade ago, and what I've learned in the intervening years is that that was a very near miss.  Rather than feeling embarrassed at my failure (oh yes, I did), I've realised I should celebrate it as getting very close to the holy grail.

The other thing I've realised as I work on the novel is how much I left unsaid.  I have a very clear idea of 

the planet Vedrana (I did draw maps of it after all), and of the Great Family system and soulships, but when I came to read the manuscript I saw that I haven't put a lot of that stuff down on paper.  My world remains created in my head and not on paper.  Which isn't a lot of use for the reader, who can't (at least, not yet) easily read the contents of my head.

The other thing I'd done was mix the two viewpoints up in the same chapter.  Yes, they were separated by section breaks and each change was clear, but that's not my style any more.  Having worked on the three Panthera books with their multiple viewpoints, short chapters, and interweaving narrative braid, I know how much more effective that can be.  So I'm reorganising the whole of Auroradawn to keep Arrien and Baak's viewpoints in separate chapters.  I've only got as far as chapter three, but already it's bringing a new crispness to the novel.

The story always had a strong structure, based around a quest to find objects with riddles on them. I'd worked out the riddle clues and the locations of each object before I started to write and I'm happy with those aspects of the story.  But the story starts with the sudden death of Arrien's mother, and she wasn't upset enough at the loss.  My rewrite is strengthening her emotions, and hopefully the reader's emotional involvement with her.

I intend to use the extra time I've just freed up straightening out my back catalogue.  And then to get the damned things sent out again.