Minding the Beat

After doing the cut and paste thing and starting to make edits and adjustments, I realized I hadn't actually read through the draft recently, so I stopped and did just that and discovered that it works just fine the way it is. Better, in fact, than if I put the scene earlier. Along the way, I also started tracking the beats in the piece and discovered a really, really useful tool for looking at the novel. Each beat is a movement and some of them are pretty feeble, they need work to justify their presence in the novel. But by breaking the novel down into these smaller units, it gives me a much more manageable way to deal with the revisions. Plus, I'm creating a grid of scenes and beats, which is giving me a phenomenal overview of the physical space the novel is occupying. It's really, really cool to see how my main character is moving through space.