Cracking on With it!

Sometimes the stars align and things happen at a decent pace.

To be fair, it actually happens a lot, only there’s so much that needs to be done that sometimes a particular project can appear stuck in the mud, with no discernible progress at all.

I’m happy to say that’s not the Old Man this week.

Making Progress!

In the last post I said I had

made it through to the closing part of [what had been Chapter One] – now Chapter Three

Today I can happily report being at the end of Chapter 11.

Let the celebrations commence!

Party’s Over!

That didn’t last long, because that’s the end of the good news…

…because Chapter 11, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks! No wonder, it’s bankruptcy law…

It’s slow, it’s dry, it’s dull, it’s too long – 16 pages – and to cap it all off I’m left with the quandary of whether to run with my noted revisions or completely rewrite it.

If I simply go with the revisions I’ve made, it’ll read better, and the pace should also benefit from some of the garbage I took out, but it’ll be a polished piece of poo – polished, but still poo.

The alternative is to reprint the Chapter with revisions, then immediately review the Chapter, make a note of what’s actually important, then rewrite it. It’ll break into at least two Chapters, possibly three.

Disheartening.

That’s not the word. This won’t be the easiest Chapter to rewrite. There are allusions in it that need to be made carefully and authentically so as not to spoil the plot. And do you remember me saying it was dull? This isn’t the most interesting or exciting Chapter, but it needs to be written.

At any rate, this deep quagmire is the best of two terrible choices, so I’ll go with it. Technically there’s a third, to drop the idea of getting published and spend the time on something else, there’s plenty of work vying for the effort. But I’m not the sort to quit simply because my task has become futile.

Tonight is the weekly Girl Scout Troop meeting, so I’ll have over an hour to go back over this chapter and get a plan together to fix it.

Next Week.

If the weather holds out, the Rabbit Barn has priority for the next several days, and the rewrite could occupy whatever time I can free up. With that in mind, my goal is to have Chapter 11 fixed by next Monday and be pressing on with the next, which will be either Chapter 13 or 14, depending on the split.

The only other thing I plan on doing is figuring out how I’m going to celebrate getting to the end of the first revision process. Hopefully the second revision will go more smoothly and I can be ready for an alpha reader before the end of the year.

We had our first frost this morning, so I hope everybody stays warm and has a great week.

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