I’m making real progress again on Talyn. Got a 1500 word net gain yesterday in spite of removing a solid chunk of text. I did it by going back to exactly the point where things went badly wrong, and writing the scene I should have written the first time. Sometimes I can pretend I got it right and just keep going, but this time I couldn’t get the brain to play along with the fingers.

So I actually fixed something in mid-first-draft.

I left in everything that I know that I’ll eventually have to cut, too — I know this is cowardice on my part — the equivalent of pretending the badly damage net under the tightrope is better than nothing — but I’m hoping that as I work my way through I’ll find something salvageable in the material that has to go. Any part of that hundred pages that I don’t have to discard will be to the good.

And just to add to the excitement, now I have to finish the galleys for Gods Old and Dark and get them back to Diana promptly, something that I’m going to have to do sitting on the couch in the afternoon while the kidlet is building Bionicles.

I’ve been plugging away on editor-requested revisions for the better part of the month, and I’m finally down to the last new scene that I have to write (and in fact when I quit today I was halfway through it). After completing it, I have two more scenes total to revise — I think I’ll be able to finish the whole thing tomorrow. I’m relieved. This has been a revision done with a tremendous amount of outside stress, and it has consequently taken a lot longer than the two weeks I estimated for the project.

This starts me out a bit behind where I wanted to be with Talyn but I’d built enough padding into my schedule that I should still be able to catch up fairly well. I’m guessing that I’ll be ready to start the actual writing on the new book next week (still a bit out line-for-scene outlining that remains to be done before I leap into that.) It’ll be good to get into something new.

Know how I said I liked to do revisions? How I enjoyed being able to go in and fix up the stuff that was already down on paper?

Lies, foul lies, all of it. At least this time. I’d say that editor-requested revisions on Gods Old and Dark were proceeding apace, but then we’d have to define ‘apace’ as ‘dragging ass like an old man with his feet stuck to the knees in frozen molasses.’

I suspect it’s going so slowly because my head is already in another book. I’m thinking Talyn, and planning that book in my sleep and in quiet moments, playing through the story in my head and living with the people, and dipping back into Gods Old and Dark is like falling into a foreign country where no one speaks the same language and the rhythms of life are alien and disturbing.

Or maybe it’s like shifting gears badly, and grinding between first and third by entirely missing second and popping the clutch, too.

Either way, I don’t know that I could actually be progressing much slower without working backwards through the book erasing the corrections I’ve already done.