Not Bad At All

I'll admit I had some concerns that when I got back from Squaw Valley and looked at my novel in the light of everything I learned, I was going to want to rip it apart and embark on a new giant revision. You'll all be relieved to hear that this is not the case. I'm still pleased with the state of the manuscript as it stands. I do plan to make some changes to the beginnings of the storylines based on feedback I received, but beginnings are always problematic things that need a million rounds of tinkering, so this is no big setback.

It took me a while after returning from the conference to actually get back to work, but I've been plugging away these last couple of days, and it's going great. What I'm doing now is what I've been doing for the past few months (with quite a few chunks of time off for travel and other activities): fixing continuity errors and tightening things up and dealing with all the other miscellaneous issues that crop up during two years of rewriting. I'm making excellent progress, and it won't be long now.

Today I added in a bunch of minor details that needed to be set up sooner than they were. I was pleased with how I worked these in. I trimmed some conversations that went on too long and fixed some sentences that didn't quite mean what I wanted them to.

Most excitingly, I read a scene that made me teary-eyed and another that made me laugh. I think I've got something good here.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Scott Lynch offers a strongly worded reminder that there is no shortcut to being good: "How long does the process of hard work + self-awareness + perseverance take? I don't know; how long is a string? There is no RIGHT path. There is no IDEAL way. There is no PROPER length of time. There is only your right path, your ideal way, your proper length of time."