Of the 7000 words I did today, more than 4000 of them were new. I’m done now, though I lost all of my hard-earned buffer in one day.
Agh. Sitting here glancing over tomorrow’s pages, and they look frighteningly like today’s. To bed in an hour, I think, and up between five-thirty and six tomorrow. Looks like it’s going to be tough.
But I’ve hit the halfway mark. And I love the way the book is turning out. So there is a definite bright side.
I’m deep in it now. Cutting from later chapters and pasting into this one, rewriting, editing, writing in new stuff that reads better than the stuff I scrawled over the stuff I’d written, and creating new material eked from the barest of bare-bones notes.
I told Jean yesterday that writing a book always feels to me like walking a tightrope, never knowing for sure if I’ll make it all the way to the other end in one piece… but that doing the write-in part of revision was where I looked down and saw the clowns running off with the net.
And I’ll add that, with the current deadline, I’m crossing with the sure knowledge that someone has set fire to the rope behind me.
The fact that coherent books come out of this process never ceases to amaze me, frankly.
But, yes, I love what I’m getting on THE SILVER DOOR. Getting it is a hair-raising experience, though.
Got pretty close to 14,000 words done today. Why go over my 10,000-word goal? Because I had a couple of fairly clean chapters, and I know I’m not far from hitting the massacre, where I started ripping holes in the manuscript and writing cryptic little notes to myself like, “Write new scene, include monster, silver door, and (X) subtheme.” When I hit those sections, the book goes from being revision to being first draft PLUS revision, and takes a lot more time, and gets a lot meaner.
So covering extra ground today seemed like a good plan. And I had Jean to hang out with online, doing tens with me. We had a pretty productive day.
Tomorrow, it’ll be into the deep mess.
Just finished day one of the type-in. I can hope the next days go faster than this one, but I don’t think I can hope it and be realistic at the same time. I need to have 10,000 completed words done each day, and I got that today, but it was a long, long haul.
First three chapters are in the can.
And I need to sleep, because I need to be up to do this again tomorrow.
But it’s worth it. This time the book is falling right, fitting the way it needs to fit.
Still. Miles to go.
I’ve been working for hours already, actually, and realized I hadn’t publicly cheered the fact that I finished write-in at about four AM today. I got a few hours of sleep, then got up and got going.
Write-in was a massacre, but the surviving words are better, stronger, and occasionally funnier. I Darwined the damned book. Now, though, I estimate that I’m going to have to toss about 10,000 existing words. And that I’m going to be typing in about 20,000 brand-new words. And make heavy fixes on about 60% of the rest of the manuscript. And I have to do it between now and o’-dark-hundred on the morning of March 15th, which is my drop-dead date for getting it to Lisa and Robin.
The book is better, better, better. I fixed every one of the issues I found, and came up with new stuff that I love. This is the last step before another human being gets to actually read what I’ve done. This step I usually love. Let’s see how it goes.
You can follow the type-in progress on the SILVER DOOR TypeIn graph in the sidebar to your right. I’ll update as I finish each chapters. At the moment, there are 24. Not sure how many there will be after I’ve pulled everything apart and put it back together again.
Wish me luck.
By the way, I haven’t beta’d a novel in a long time, but I think I’m going to beta this one. As I get closer to finishing the book, I’ll post some sort of contest here, and send five winners a copy of the revised first draft for comments and questions.
This revision continues to be a complete beast. I’m not quite ready to do type-in yet, and when I am ready, there’s going to be a lot to type in.
But this book has been brutal because it had not just wrong scenes in it (those are easy to fix—you throw them out and start over), but right scenes in the wrong places and with the wrong characters.
My previous method of revising wasn’t working, which was causing me much stress and angst. Did some deep breathing to clear my head and calm myself, and came up with a much better way of doing a One-Pass Revision specifically for scrambled books.
Progress is moving along sweetly now, but won’t if I don’t get back to work. ;D
I’m still slogging the revision, but I’ve had a couple of huge breakthroughs.
I love what’s happening with the story, and I’m so grateful for the extra couple of weeks I was given to pursue these course corrections. Sorry to be so scarce. Will continue to be scarce until this thing is done. I have eleven more days.
I’ve asked for an received another two weeks to do the revisions. While I could have had the book at its existing length in on time (March 1st), I’ve discovered that there are two areas where I want to be able to add significant length–my best guess is about 20,000 additional words. Those two areas are The Cryptic Monster, and The Mysterious Boy. Yes, vague hints and teases again. But no spoilers, because spoilers suck.
And sent along my favorite visual scene to see if it would be usable as cover art. If not I’ll dig through the manuscript and find another, but I have my fingers crossed.
