When In Doubt, Drop Back and Punt

By Holly Lisle

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.

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