Done! Now for the rewriting.

Over the Memo­r­i­al Day week­end, I fin­ished the rough draft of my new book. (No title yet.) What does that mean? First, relief. It has been a two-year effort. Nonethe­less, I am far from fin­ished. Hav­ing a com­plete book means I can now rewrite with the whole sto­ry in my head. As I have said else­where, I can­not write a good first page until I write a good last page. Now I must bring the whole book togeth­er, hope­ful­ly, in some seam­less, log­i­cal, com­pelling fash­ion. Dur­ing this process I make count­less changes, some big. For those who know my New­bery book, Crispin: The Cross of Lead, they may be sur­prised that the cross of lead, which is so key to the book, was not added until after the first draft was writ­ten.  More­over, I think there were at least ten dif­fer­ent open­ing chap­ters to that book.  The fact is, this peri­od of rewrit­ing, is my favourite part of the process. A lot of the ten­sion of cre­at­ing is gone. In its place comes the joy of mak­ing the book deep­er, rich­er, a bet­ter expe­ri­ence for the reader—and, dare I say—for this writer, too.