The novel editing proceeds more or less on schedule, which means I’m still wondering what the hell I was thinking, but I guess that’s basically my natural state as a writer.

One of the challenges I had with this novel in its first draft is that one of the most important characters is off-screen for much of the story. Her scenes and activities are conveyed in summary form after the fact, interspersed throughout the novel. There wasn’t any help for this at the time. I had to get the story out from the main protagonist’s perspective first. But now that it’s done, all that summary is just a godawful drag on the story, and needs to go.

So I’ve been taking those summarized details, and expanding them into full scenes that shift the point of view to the secondary character. And as I do this, I’m converting the info dumps that exist in the first draft to drama that actually appears on the page. The protagonist’s chapters are beginning to shrink to manageable sizes while these new chapters grow.

In essence, I’m writing the novel again from the secondary character’s perspective. It will be shorter, with fewer overall chapters — right now the pattern seems to be working out to one secondary character chapter for every two primary — but it still feels like writing the novel again. And I’m finding that to be a good thing: I’ve recaptured the excitement of writing it in the first place.

It’s very liberating. I don’t feel any stress over ripping out huge swaths of talking heads and info dumps, because I’m going to make those into shown-not-told scenes for the secondary character. And I don’t feel any need to wax loquacious with the new chapters, because everything else is already in the first draft chapters. Can’t say for sure this will work out in the end, but so far so good.