After denying the inevitable for the last few months, I now realise how necessary significant rewrites are for my book. I had hoped that small re-writes for specific passages would suffice, and I planned a timetable that would mean I finished these by March.

That included a full re-write of chapter six, because it simply wasn't good enough. It's no coincidence that this was the first thing I started writing back in January 2016 (when it was chapter seven, in fact). Over the last fortnight, I have rewritten the chapter from scratch and it feels like much better quality writing. Now that I've finally written the rest of it, I inevitably have much better confidence with the tone, characterisation and style of the book.

Unfortunately, this means that large parts of the other chapters I started with will need the same treatment. So I'm faced with effectively having to rewrite the entire first half of the book. 

Groan.

This is exactly what I hoped to avoid, but I can't ignore the fact that the quality of the earliest writing is so much worse than what comes later. My absolute deadline for finishing the book was always going to be my 40th birthday on 25th July. I'm still working on the book for 30 minutes each normal work day. There are 79 of those between now and my birthday, which should allow me to rewrite around 24,000 words. 

So I'd better get on with it.