Dance of done-ness, for real this time

This last week I have had a hard time writing, barely scratching out 300 or so words a day on days when I did write. After last week’s surge of production, this was quite disheartening, so I started to focus instead not on word counts, but the story.

What I added last week was at the time what I felt was about 1/3 of what the book needed to really be shiny. I was aiming for a revised MS in the 120-125K range, and had played around with adding some small content to the latter half of the book.

Three days ago, I identified a pretty big flaw with the timeline, and realized that somewhere in the last few months, the dates of when things happen had shifted away from a core element of the story. What’s worse, when it happened a core value of the protagonist was abandoned/betrayed, and that was part of why I was not happy.

Yesterday, I started fixing it, and today, I finished. And in the process, completed the copy-edits on the last 100 or so pages, adding one additional bit of story inside already completed chapters.

And then I realized that I was well and truly finished, and that the book was complete and solid at 107.5K words. The story that needs to be told in book one is laid out and “there.” The recompressed timeline sets up book two perfectly, and every character has a completed arc, even ones that appear in two pages only.

So now, I need a new outline. and tomorrow, it’s off to second readers. A very short list (already selected, sorry), but ones largely unencumbered by the previous draft. If you are a first reader still working through what you have, please continue and give me your feedback, it is still very useful to me.

But tomorrow, the outline will be revised and set by use of a locked pdf, not the malleable document into which I have pored digital sweat these last 15 months. And once I get me some feedbacks, I’m hoping a few folks I know back east are still in the same mood they were last summer.

Fingers crossed. Looks like I need me a job, so that I can hit a couple WorldCons this year.

And , In a week I’ll go back to Book Two, which has lain dormant since November.

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