The rewrite is going better than I could have hoped. I worked really hard before Christmas and got almost everything done I had, so I could leave as much of January free as possible. I never thought I'd be taking almost a whole month off to work on a novel, but here I am doing it.
I've done a lot of planning, storyboarding and notations, now I'm into the actual rewrite. And true to the way stories are, you can never finish improving them. With all the notes I've made the structural changes are writing themselves, and I'm putting things into much better words as well.
I know it's faster, leaner and better because I've stripped out a lot of backstory and exposition, and the stuff that's absolutely necessary I've stitched to the action far better.
But I won't say I regret it a little. Part of the charm of the original manuscript was how real it felt talking about the business community of the near future. A lot of that had t do with Albert the investigator and his side of the story, and now much of it's being lost.
I also always enjoyed the asides. No matter how much it was in the wrong place I liked the long entire sequence of what went wrong in the 1950s to cause the bridge to fall much later. I once read a critic say Neal Stevenson didn't do anything like it in his novels, freezing the action for pages and pages to go into reams of backstory, exposition and explanation. There was always something about that approach that I took with Falling, and I liked it.
So that's why I'm trying to take a media-savvy approach with it. I'm keeping all the cut material so when it becomes a hit people are going to want to look at the deleted scenes in the ebook version, just like they do on a DVD copy of a movie they love.
Anyway it's only three days into the new year and aside from probably a week or so of work I have all this month. I'm already at the end of part 2 with the rewriting, so it looks very good.