La Vie Boheme

Minions!

Well, the Minions met last night and we all did our first critiques of each other. I'll concur with Julie: We're a talented bunch. :) I have so much good stuff to work on with the first several chapters of The Host now, I feel more enthused about diving in and editing again. The only problem, of course, is that I want to go back and rework the first five chapters (well, prelude and four chapters) again. I'm resisting that urge, because I feel like I should at least finish rewriting the whole thing first, then go back and tweak.

The good news is, they liked it. This made me happy. They also had some great insights, both into factual details that were fuzzy or wrong (hey, the novel's set at the University of Michigan and all three of them are U of M alumni) and in the more esoteric type stuff.

The bad news is, as excited as I am to get back to work, I'm also feeling remarkably lazy. Part of my head is whining, "But I don't WAAAANT to completely rework David as a character!" Which is a problem, because David's a pretty lame character as written. (I've described him as the stereotypical hero's girlfriend in your basic pulpy sort of story: decorative, exists only for the hero's purposes, doesn't do much.) That's why my first instinct was to cut him rather than flesh him out. But he needs to be there. I'm realizing, thinking over the course of the novel, that there just isn't enough conflict between A.J. and her "real life". Sure, she's got conflict, but it's largely either internal, or completely removed from her everyday life. David, as a boyfriend or at least potential boyfriend, could be excellent fodder for real world conflict. I hint at it a little, but I don't use it enough.

You know, I'd tried retyping in the manuscript as a rewriting tool, thinking that would make me rethink everything I typed, but that hasn't happened as much as I had expected. When I type from a manuscript, I think part of my brain shuts off and I go into data entry mode. If I can just find a way to stop that...

So yeah. I want to rewrite. But I don't want to rewrite. Geh.