Rereading

So, I've just finished reading over the first draft of the novel I wrote last year (and of which I'm planning on finally starting the rewrites soon).

This read was just to refamiliarize myself with the novel and see how I felt about it after having left it alone for so long. Turns out I feel pretty good about it. When I started rereading it last night, even after telling myself I really had to get to bed, I kept wanting to read one more chapter, until finally I ended up staying up till 6 a.m. reading the darn thing before I finally managed to wrench myself away and go to bed. I guess the fact that it had me engrossed so much—even though I knew what was going to happen—could be taken as a good sign. (Though the fact that it appeals to me, of course, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to appeal to anyone else.)

That's not to say it doesn't badly need some revisions, though. It could be tightened up quite a bit; there are a lot of passages with more words than are needed, or that tell what can already be inferred from what's shown. There are some rather blatant mistakes; one character's name I frequently got wrong, and another character I somehow managed to (sort of) kill off twice only to apparently forget about it both times and have her show up again as if nothing had happened. And then there are some relics of matters about which I changed my mind during the writing process—another character's name I changed from Ulrigh to Ulright, and it's still Ulrigh in the early chapters; still another character is described as looking fully human in the beginning, when I later decided he didn't look fully human at all, and at the end I also decided he was much younger than I had planned initially, which means I need to excise the references to his gray hairs. And, of course, I've already mentioned my intention of deleting the entire first chapter—or almost the entire chapter, anyway; the last few sentences might be moved to the beginning of what was then Chapter 2 but will now be Chapter 1.

The change that may take the most work, though, is figuring out how to introduce the protagonist's love interest earlier. As it is, she doesn't show up until (what is now) Chapter 9 (she's mentioned by name a bit earlier, in Chapter 5, but only in the context of a list of all the crew members in her shift). That, again, was because of changes I made as I was writing. When I began the story I didn't know the protagonist was going to have a love interest at all, but when her character was introduced for other reasons entirely (and assigned a hitherto otherwise unused name from the list in Chapter 5), it just sort of happened, and I went with it. But while she and the protagonist may not start to get into a relationship till Chapter 9 or 10, I'd really rather have her make an appearance well before that. I'm not sure yet how to gracefully introduce her earlier, but I'll think of something.

Anyway, though, I guess my main point is just that, the inevitable flaws notwithstanding, the novel held up much better to a rereading than I had feared it might. So far so good.

Now I've got to really get into those revisions...