Revision geekery

So revising a book, in a tear-it-apart-and-put-it-together-as-a-new-thing way, is always interesting. There are things where I’m all, “But no! I loved that thing!” even while seeing how structurally the book is better off without them. For a very few of those places I come back around to “Wait! I need to keep that after all!” and scramble to pull a thing back in, only in a better way. (But not the javelinas. Never the javelinas.) And then there are other places, where I find myself saying, “Wait, that thing that actually was a little bit of a stretch in the old draft, even though I didn’t quite realize it and/or admit it to myself? It makes way more sense now.” As if those things were always part of another, stronger book, and they were just waiting for me to figure it out.