Novelized
For the past couple of weeks, on and off, I’ve been flipping through a printout of the novel, marking things up. This is still a relatively shallow rewrite; I’ve been tweaking passages that read badly or making other cosmetic changes. I need to go deeper, and I will, eventually. In some cases, my markups have included notes to myself to go back and rewrite a whole passage or to insert some as-yet-undetermined dialogue or business which will help to flesh out a character.
Tonight, I started transferring the marked-up corrections to the novel as it is stored on my hard drive.
I think I like this novel. But I also think I need to make a few major changes to it. The romantic scenes near the end are way too abrupt and need to be heavily rewritten. Some of the Kenyan characters are given short shrift — although, in a sense, this may be a testament to my shallow understanding of some of the people with whom I worked in 2004, 2005 and 2006. If I understood the real-life Kenyans better, my fictional Kenyans would seem more real.
I talked to an old college friend of mine last night who now works in intellectual property law. Maybe in another year or so, I’ll have a contract with some book publishing company for him to look over. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
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Kathy T.
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