Tomorrow I’ll start on the type-in, but for today, I’m done, done, done!
The write-in revision went well. The beta tester comments helped—folks found a lot of the same issues my editor found, as well as a few things that didn’t bother her, but bothered me. I managed to cover both bits of ground. No doubt I’ll make some changes during type-in. I always do, after all. But they’ll be small changes.
And when this is done, I get to start writing and building How To Think Sideways. I’m excited.
I’ve been haunting the local bookstore, and THE RUBY KEY isn’t on the shelves yet, so it didn’t really dawn on me that people are already reading it.
But Tina already has a review up (and is giving a copy away), and I’m not ready.
I knit two pairs of Genna’s socks to give away, and they’re done, but not blocked, and I haven’t done certificates of authenticity for them or anything. At the moment, they’re just two teenager-sized pairs of woolly green socks.
If you spot the book, please let me know where you find it (in the store–YA, front of the store, in with the adult fantasy….I worry about where it’s going to land), and when it lands.
Meanwhile, I’ll get the sock stuff done for the giveaway.
You have until tomorrow 10 AM to throw your name in as a beta reader, just because I’m not going to have time to do the hat thing today.
Done, mailed to my agent and my editor, and I own my weekend. Which I will spend an inordinate amount of time sleeping through, no doubt.
DONE. And I love it. It was, I think, worth all the pain.
You have the whole weekend to tell me why you should be one of the five people who gets to read the First Draft Beta (knowing there will be spoilers for book one in it, so do keep that in mind.) You do not have to check it for errors, though if you find any, you’re welcome to e-mail me and let me know. It will just be a fun (I hope) read.
I’ll do a drawing on Monday.
Everybody can enter.
Please forgive me for not including this earlier. My brain was still sizzling when I wrote the post.
In this instance the point of the beta is to see if there are parts that you, having not read the first book, don’t get. Scholastic has awesome copyeditors (or at least I got one), and I’ve already sent the book to my editor in order to make deadline, so any real foul-ups that I’ve left in there at this point she’s going to see—no chance of saving face. 
But if you come across things that you simply do not understand because I have made the hard-to-avoid error of assuming the reader would have read the first book first, THAT I need to know about.
Which means that, compared to a regular beta, this will be a walk in the park. You write down the page number where you got confused, and what confused you. And that’s it.
Only have to get through 10,000 words today. But today has been the Slaughter of the Trite, and though I started at 7 AM, I have ripped out so many words and deleted so much stuff that even with squeezing in and writing a ton of new pages, I’m at -875 words for the day, and still a whole 805 words short of having edited a my full 10,000.
I’m dragging. Revision is a marathon, always, and I knew this going in. And at least the migraines were gone today, but I’ve definitely hit the wall. Book may not end up at 80,000 words after all. Which is fine. I’ll take 60,000 great words over 80,000 that are full of the stuff I killed today anytime.
But, there’s still a long way to the end of this, and God am I tired.
Any bets on the order these three are going to finish in?
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.