15 December 09

I have continued working on the novel. I now have (I think, anyway) all the major stuff in place, including tweaks to the story-line, several editing passes through everything, and now have the chapter headings like I want them for now. I have been putting in four or five hours most nights, usually ending at three or four in the morning. This last weekend I took off - we spent the whole time with old sailing friend,s one of whom was in town briefly.

And from that I had quite an experience. One of them is halfway through reading the book, the first person other than soul mate to see it. She started reading an older version that was laying on the desk - I wasn't asking anyone to start reading it yet. She said she couldn't put it down and had finished four chapters in a few hours. Thus far she is still enthused - I printed her out her own copy of the current version, and the deal we made was that she would call me when she was finished with it, regardless of the time. I'm looking forward to hearing, but still have that "walking on eggshells" feeling. Also I printed out the most vanilla of my poetry and short stories and it was a real upper to get approving reactions from them both as well. Also a first, the first time anyone outside of twitter has seen them as well.

I haven't rechecked the word count - it's high enough now that I think it will be taken seriously as a novel. I've been going through the post-nano stuff, and much of it is useful information as far as proceeding to the next step. This will be a long process.

9 December 09

The work continues. There were a few days I was just mentally empty before I finally got started on finishing what I set out to do. This involved adding more in areas where I thought the storytelling was a little weak, going through for consistency and plot sequence (never thought I'd use those words together), wording and meaning and just generally being the best work I could possibly produce, and then some more mechanical stuff - renumbering chapters where I added stuff, and so forth. I am just about to do a huge edit - tonight I think - of everything marked up and added. This gets a lot like work sometimes. Programming is easier, but (unfortunately) habitual by this point in my life.

I think the total is somewhere above 75,000 words by now - I'll know better after I'm through merging. At least it's up at the level it needs to be to be taken seriously as a novel. All of my friends made it through the 50,000 word point. They seem to be as shell-shocked as I am, judging by the lack of Twitter traffic or writing adventures from any of them. About the most I can manage is some erotic poetry for MicroFantasyMonday - I couldn't deal with prose in another venue at the moment. This is it.

I'm linking into this from my Facebook page - just finishing getting that up. Ah, technology...

At some point I need to produce a longer synopsis. That will be difficult - I'll probably post it here.

Found a quote (actually a number of quotes) from Hemmingway I liked - "I write about one page of good stuff for every ninety-nine pages of shit. I try to leave the shit in the trashcan"