It took three weeks longer than I had planned, but the pumpkin novel is finally finished. I got tired of thinking about the alternate worlds novel about a third of the way into today’s twelve-hour editathon, so I switched to the pumpkin novel. The original plan was to finish the pumpkin novel this week while saving the alternate worlds novel for this weekend. Now that the pumpkin novel was finished (and it was slow to finish), it’s time to concentrate on the alternate worlds again. I have a spreadsheet of every scene in the novel. Scenes that will definitely get cut are marked, along with scenes that are definitely keeps or scenes that are keeps if and only if they undergo substantial rewrites for quality or to remove an plot element that no longer exists.
Scenes with one person in them also got marked. I had a surprisingly high number of these scenes. Since these scenes usually aren’t as powerful as those scenes with multiple characters in them, they’ll probably get cut or substantially rewritten to be more interesting. My main character’s (or at least the person I originally intended to be the main character) story arc turned out to be the least interesting of all the major characters, so I’ll also be reworking it to be more so.
But I have something to work from. This is more than I can say about every other novel I’ve ever written. Note to self: Do this more often.