So this Saturday is turn­ing out like I’d inten­ded the last one to. I’ve made it through a big por­tion of my novel going through the first les­son of Holly Lisle’s “How To Revise Your Novel” and it’s good to look the dif­fi­cult bits in the face. There really aren’t that many. It will take effort to fix them, but it’s com­pletely within my abil­ity to do, espe­cially with Holly teach­ing me how to fix the prob­lems I find.

I’m close to half way done, hop­ing to accom­plish more this even­ing. It will be nice to show some pro­gress on the pro­gress bar.

I made good head­way in under­stand­ing the method to be used as I begin my big revi­sion. The attempt now is to get through the whole novel, sys­tem­at­ic­ally mark­ing down the broken bits (using a code I’m start­ing to catch on to) this weekend.

I’m excited. More than a little, in fact. I love to see pro­gress hap­pen. I love see­ing some­thing good and mak­ing it even bet­ter. There’s such sat­is­fac­tion in that. It’s what I love about dir­ect­ing theatre, and what makes me want to grow as a writer.

Finished take one of my daughter’s room, and it nearly did me in. How can a twelve-​year-​old accu­mu­late so much?

I’m miss­ing writ­ing, but still have much to do in my theatre dir­ector hat. So many pas­sions, so little time. Or more sig­ni­fic­antly in my case, so little energy. I care­fully horde and ration it out.

Tomorrow will be my last catch-​up clean­ing day. The biggest stuff is nearly done, the smal­ler things can pro­gress in smal­ler incre­ments, leav­ing me resources for the writ­ing part of my heart’s work.

Yeah, the ol’ whizmat­ronic bean counter that shows my pro­gress isn’t look­ing too good. Since the cur­rent pur­pose of this site is account­ab­il­ity, I need to give account for why this is.

Well, between Nanowrimo and other gen­er­ally chaotic life happpen­ing, my poor house has been woe­fully neg­lected for quite some time. A dear writer friend, Vivian Arend, helped me estab­lish some order on Friday and it motiv­ated me to get the rest of it dealt with too.

It’s hard to write with a guilty con­science, and mounds of laun­dry can achieve an accus­at­ory look sel­dom real­ised by inan­im­ate objects. So while I’m not dir­ectly pro­gress­ing in my writ­ing adven­ture, I’m set­ting things up to make it easier in the very near future. Perhaps I should set the bean counter to show the pro­gress in my home instead!

Friday: Two rooms in order

Saturday: One room in order

Sunday: Two rooms in order, plus Christmas dec­or­a­tions away

Not bad, and the rest can reas­on­ably be expec­ted to be done by the end of the week, hope­fully includ­ing re-​creating my office/​writing space.

Onwards!

I knew I would be writ­ing only on M-​W-​F until other com­mit­ments are com­plete. The first assign­ment is so intense (described by its cre­ator as the hard­est) that pick­ing at it bit by bit isn’t work­ing too well. I think I will focus on under­stand­ing the pro­cess as well as I can, and devote sev­eral hours together on Saturday to just immers­ing myself in it and get­ting it done.

Looking for­ward to Saturday!

After a much needed hiatus dur­ing December, I’ve begun my new Holly Lisle course, “How To Revise Your Novel”. I will spend the next sev­eral months learn­ing manu­script Triage and how to fix what’s broken, using the novel I com­pleted dur­ing Nanowrimo. The course is intense, but once the skills are learned future revi­sions are far less pain­ful. Seems like a good investment!

I’ve also writ­ten a memoir-​type art­icle on the effect of sum­mer camp in my life, which I’m con­sid­er­ing sub­mit­ting to a few places. With my fam­ily and other non-​writing com­mit­ments, we’ll see how far I get with that pro­cess in the next few weeks.

Onward and upward!

Thank you, thank you. I’d like to thank the academy.…

Just kid­ding. But today I com­pleted my 50 000 words for Nanowrimo this year, and a few hun­dred words after that I fin­ished the actual story, very rough first draft.

Phew!

I am hop­ing to get in on Holly Lisle’s new class, How To Revise Your Novel (which this one will surely need) right away, but if the class fills too soon, I think I’ll be con­tent to go back to learn­ing more plot tech­niques and other good­ies from my still unfin­ished courses. Yes, I am a quick start and I’ll leave one thing for another that’s shi­nier, only to return to the first thing at a dif­fer­ent time. Keeps life inter­est­ing, and it’s all the more reason to be proud that I kept the pace up for the whole month of November.

Go me!

And here I am, within sight of the Nano fin­ish line. I still have some writ­ing to do, and my end­ing has morphed some­what from what I had ori­gin­ally planned, but I think it’s going to all come together alright. I have a quiet even­ing before me and if I press on, I may get to the end by tonight.

Another unex­pec­ted death occured in my char­ac­ters, but this one served to strengthen the protag — she had been if not exactly res­cued, then helped a few times already and I think she needed to go through some hard things on her own. The next help­ing hand to appear will be in the form of another woman, and I like that. We’ve had her fig­ur­at­ive knight in shin­ing armor attempt and fail to res­cue her, but then she struck a bar­gain with her jailer and he helped her escape, but he died in the pro­cess, leav­ing her stran­ded in the wil­der­ness, sup­posedly close to some kind of set­tle­ment. Gotta get wrap­ping this story up, and since the title is “Phoenix and the Vulture”, we bet­ter have a bit more Vulture action before the end.

I’m ram­bling, and should be adding to my Nano word­count instead. See you on the other side.

Had an unex­pec­ted plot twist that really helped motiv­a­tion for a planned event. Thank good­ness I went with it when I wanted to write the death of the really bad guy instead of fol­low­ing the out­line points! It has cre­ated a much more tempt­ing internal con­flict for our heroine and while it didn’t add a whole new scene, it makes the story stronger, I think.

My word count is soar­ing and I’m hop­ing to be done a little ahead of sched­ule. Over 3000 words today sure helped.

Well, I’m truly in the final stretch of this novel. The Great Betrayal has occurred, my prot­ag­on­ist doesn’t yet know what’s in store for her, but I do and it’s gonna be fun to write!

I am writ­ing the scenes to fit into the 50 000 word count. A few bits I wrote today could be expan­ded into full scenes of their own, but would have to be in a dif­fer­ent POV and in a work this short I don’t want to do that. Should I decide to expand the whole novel later, that will be a good option.

Tomorrow I will be meet­ing with other writers at a cof­fee shop to cheer each other on and up the word count some more. So long as reg­u­lar life doesn’t totally implode in the mean time, I will fin­ish just a little ahead of schedule.