John's 6th rewrite

Yes, a 6th rewrite. It becomes more clear to me with each go-through and turn of the page that what I wrote the first five times was a particularly well-crafted skeleton, but I keep running into the same problems:

1 People can't picture the characters and scenes as I describe them. In part this is because I'm light on details, usually only the relevant of-the-moment details for coloring the story to life, but I've changed a lot of the sound of piece, the character's anger being a big issue (Because his writer is less angry), so I've found the flexibility to put in details...and it's helping. But it's got me going through this literally a line at a time to see what I can trim, rebuild and shape better.

2 People still can't tell who's speaking. I want to wholly blame other people for their not figuring out if two people are speaking, and you already saw what X-said, the other dialogue must be Y. And sometimes people are just a little thick on the idea, and sometimes I'm not leaving enough cues within the dialogue for them to figure it out. Again, this has got me going back to a line-item analysis.

3 I'm not cohering things together, just writing scenes. Nothing is more infuriating to me than this charge, and it makes me want to hurl things. This is my fear, that I am unable to craft a contiguous plot, and one thing I'm actually learning is that my fear is unfounded, because there is a plot, it's just not strongly delineated. Again, line-by-line edits help me fight this feeling of a disjointed story.

So, I'm 30 pages into the rewrite, after 2 days of work. And I have all of May to work relatively undisturbed on it. My new goal is to work as diligently and as intensely as I can, and re-assess my goals on Memorial Day. My gut says the novel will be complete by then, and I can spend June mapping out the second while I send this one out. That's an awesome thing to say, so I'll have to say it more often.