Just finished a revision of one of my Clarion West stories. This one's been bugging me for some time (well, obviously, since I wrote the first draft at Clarion West.) It was one of the best things I wrote at Clarion West. Maybe one of the best things I've ever written, period. But there was one scene near the beginning that didn't really work. Many people suggested that I take it out altogether. John Crowley convinced me not to do that by pointing out several things that the scene did for the story, and suggested that what I needed was a scene that still did all of those things and yet somehow felt more like an integral part of the rest of the story.

Well, that sounded simple enough.

But, of course, an accurate description of the answer to a problem is not the same thing as the answer to the problem. Over the course of the past 16 months, I've spent many an idle moment pondering possible replacements for that scene, and rejected every single one of them for one reason or another.

I finally figured out one that I liked this morning as I was getting out of bed.

So I wrote it, and made some more tweaks to the story, and rewrote the ending, too, while I was at it. (My first draft endings are almost always incredibly lame, largely for reasons of pacing. I'm usually so happy to see the end in sight that I barrel through to it much too quickly. So I stretched things out by a couple hundred more words, and put a better kicker at the end.)

So, I've finally done this rewrite that's been hanging over my head all this time, and it's off to my writers' group for crits next week.

My goal is to get this story and a couple of others that I've been holding off on out in the mail in a couple of weeks, after I'm safely ensconced in the new apartment.

Urk. New apartment. We start moving next Friday. (We have about a 10 day overlap between when we get the keys to the new place and when we have to be out of the old place. So this is going to be an ongoing process.) Things are pretty much under control. We have a lot of packing to do. Urk.

I am very much looking forward to the new place, though. More space! Less commute! Hurrah!