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.