I am a sucker for jigsaw puzzles.  My wonderful family got me a couple for Father’s Day, and they have been sucking up my time ever since.  I really should be helping humanity by liking Facebook pages and retweeting hashtags.  I really should be finishing my novel.  But no, I have to be working on this.

Here are the ways that working on a jigsaw puzzle is better than writing fiction:

• Each piece has one and only one place where it goes.  Find it, and you’re through with that piece.  None of this tiresome moving paragraphs around and changing motivations and fiddling with adjectives.
• When you’re done, you’re done.  You don’t have to look at it when you’re finished and think: Maybe that boat on the right should be bigger.  Maybe the water in the middle should be a different shade of blue.
• Even one of these hard 1000-piece puzzles only takes about a month in your spare time.  You don’t look up at the clock and realize a year has gone by and you’re still not done.

Here are the ways that writing fiction is better than working on a jigsaw puzzle:

• You don’t lose pieces.
• When you finish a jigsaw puzzle, no one asks you to do a sequel.
• Every once in a while you earn a tiny bit of money from your fiction.  No one has ever offered to pay me for doing a jigsaw puzzle.

I’d say it’s about a tie.

As I hoped, the second draft of my novel went a lot faster than the first.  By the time I had finished the first draft, I had pages of notes about what I needed to change, and I came up with lots of new ideas before beginning the second draft.  New characters showed up!  Old characters disappeared!  Motivations got rejiggered!  New plot twists got twisted!

There’s more to be done, but at least now the thing feels like a completed novel.  It exists; before it was more or less a jumble in my mind.

Here’s the kind of thing I’m going to have to do now: the last words of the novel used to be “Gwen repeated.”  But this morning I decided they should be: “Gwen said again.”  But as I say the words over in my mind, I’m not entirely happy with the internal rhyme.  Will anyone care?  No.  But I think I better change them back.  Or maybe not.

A note on the authoring process: somewhere on this blog I’ve talked about rewriting on a computer.  Computers make it easy to use your original draft as the basis for the rewrite, but that lessens the incentive to re-imagine your content.  This time around I started with a blank document, but I copied the first draft into it chapter by chapter.  Often I would use a sentence from the original; occasionally an entire paragraph.  But mostly the text was there to remind me of what was going on, and most of it got deleted as I completed its replacement.  Overall, I managed to reduce the books length by about seven percent, which was one of my goals.  The first draft didn’t feel quite streamlined enough for a private eye novel.

Now on to the tweaking!