Yet Another Excuse.

Yummy Burrito I don’t get to eat

So anyway, before I get on with the meat of today’s update, I’ll ply you with yet another excuse for my tardiness in posting. I’m ahead of schedule  –just! – with my revisions, but that’s of not important when the plan is to post every week.

I finished off that abominable four-day fast and then got on board with the paleo diet in the effort to finally get to grips with what I think is a dietary cause of my pompholyx eczema. I’d been initially heartened when, during my preliminary fast, a breakout that had just begun then cleared up almost as quickly as it would taking prednisolone. Well, two weeks into the paleo diet and that changed with another breakout, so somewhat following the direction of Healthy Gut, Healthy You, I’ve made the switch to Autoimmune Paleo, or AIP. It tightens up the foods available even further. During this whole process I haven’t really recovered any energy or motivation. For instance, as part of our plan for healthy family time, we decided to clean up and service our cycles, which had been stored in the barn, but walking back up the hill with them I got fatigued almost immediately, so obviously something isn’t quite right. Today I’ve opted to start taking multivitamins to see if that helps, but recently I haven’t felt like doing anything at all and that’s not normal for me.

But, enough of my whinging!

Progress With The Revision.

The zero revision of Old Man

I surprised myself with some progress a few days ago by getting as far as one of the major plot twists – that point where the reader is supposed to have decided what the story is all about, but then has the rug pulled from underneath their feet and has to reconsider. There’s one more to go and I may work in some more during the redraft.

So far I’m fairly happy with the novel. There’s the plot line in Chapter 5 that I’m considering removing, some issues with character dialogue where some characters didn’t talk quite the way I envisioned – do people talk as we envision? – and there’s been a little bit of continuity failure, but that’s all fairly easy to tidy up.

Planning Ahead.

One thing I want to do is sketch out the lay of the Estate and the house itself to be sure that, for instance, I never say the rising sun shines in both sides at the same time because every room has an east facing window.

One other thing I want to do – and this might seem odd given how long this process is taking – is take another month away from it when I’m done with this review, then review it again using Jenna Moreci’s self-edit process, or my own implementation of it – I especially like the highlighter idea. I have only six chapters left to review, so it shouldn’t take too long.

Kronenbourg 1664.

Once all that’s complete I can get on with writing the closing chapter, tying all the loose ends together in an appropriate fashion, writing a new first chapter to go before the current first chapter, and finally deciding whether I’m going to stick with The Old Man as a title because I have another one in mind.

Then I can start looking for Beta Readers, and have all the flaws of the plot and my writing in general laid out before me in cold, stark reality.

That’ll be fun!

Meantime, if you’re not on a crazy diet like mine, enjoy your dinner and maybe have a glass of something on my behalf since I can’t.

I hope to be back on Monday with no excuses!

Categories: Readthrough, The Old Man, Work Update