Finished off the first review of the novel. Conclusions:

• I definitely lost track of the timing in some places. The book takes place over 60 years and has three main characters, so there are lots of gaps to be bridged and simultaneous actions to be managed
• Some of the prose is pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. It’s not ‘transparent’ but, as the man (Neil Young) says, ‘that’s my style’. There’s work to be done to eliminate a great number of commas and provide more variety in sentence structure but overall it doesn’t make me want to abandon all hope of writing and go live in a cave.
• My preliminary assessment is that there’s a fairly even balance between scenes that need to be added and scenes that can come out, which I think is good.
• There are some big decisions I’ve been avoiding and now is the time they’ll have to be made.
• There are lots of little decisions I’ve also been avoiding (what is the name of that town? What titles do people use? What time of year is it?) that will also have to be made. At least I have to establish some consistency, if only to make it easier to use ‘search and replace’ later in the process.

Next steps:

• make some easy text changes. This reread wasn’t for prose but there are some rough bits to be fixed.
• Note all the bigger issues to be changed, checked, reviewed
• Consider having a trusted reader go through it and give me some help in making the big decisions I’ve been dithering about.

Onward!