Lots of Work to do.

After a busy week where everything that could break at the most awkward time found exactly that moment to fail, from the deck belt on the lawnmower that had racked up almost an hour of mowing time before snapping, to the brakes and assorted expensive associated hardware on our Subaru – oddly enough, both examples gave some warning by the emission of some quite expensive seeming smells.

Beyond that, there were the Christmas cake and puddings to take care of, which are already a month behind schedule – yes, I like to make my Christmas deserts a good way out to enable some maturing and absorption of various spirits in the long run-up to the festive season.

And now…!

The mandatory excuses having been dealt with, I’ve spent a good part of the morning prepping for the start of the redraft, collating notes and ideas from the first four original chapters. Even now, there are issues that jump out at me, so I’m not certain that I’ll be ready for beta readers after this revision. Hopefully I will be, and that’ll be much more likely if I keep better notes as I go.

One thing I’m looking forward to is having the Chapters broken into the more reasonable sizes, with each dealing with a particular event or plot-point. I’m not so keen on my idea of introducing an additional chapter to go at the front as a new Chapter One, but I think it’s worth trying that in order to set the story up better than just jumping in with Little Jimmy.

Today is one of those twice-per-month Girl Scouts Troop meetings were I’ll definitely have time, peace and quiet to get to work, so my goal is to have the new Chapter One written and the first two of the original chapters revised by the end of the week.

No Illusions.

I’m under no illusions as to how easy this is going to be. I don’t consider my own self-edit skills to be any more effective than my handwriting is legible, and illegible handwriting certainly makes the process harder. Any time reading back over hand written notes when it is difficult to determine what is actually written is a time when it’s that much harder to determine what was actually meant by whatever that note actually said.

While it’s not going to be easy, I’m confident that it will at least be fun, which is why I’m also under no illusions that I’ll actually get to spend much time on it.

So, once my Chromebook is charged up, and while the house is quiet, for some inspiration I’ll put on some Jenna Moreci, Kim Chance or Vivien Reis YouTube videos, and start hitting those keys until the word vomit starts to resemble something like an acceptable Chapter One.

I hope everyone has a great week and nothing breaks. I look forward to having some tangible progress to write about next week.

Categories: Revision, The Old Man, Work Update, Writing