I’m resurrecting Tell Me Tuesday for the next few weeks, until I host my next Guest Blogger (Susan Gable, for those interested, who’s visiting February 9th, for those not inclined to check the schedule in the sidebar). So please share your news—good or bad. How’s the writing going? The non-writing? Great, horrible, indifferent?
As my faithful readers know, I took a Blog Holiday for most of December. Because My Liege’s work and the kids’ college/university didn’t start until Jan. 5/6th, the Blog Holiday extended as well. When I returned to my work in progress, I found it difficult to sink back into the characters. So I spent a good week editing from the beginning of the manuscript (I’m about 2/3 – 3/4 of the way through the writing of the whole thing). This gave me the opportunity to tighten and apply comments from The Suzannah contest, which the manuscript finaled in recently (and the finalists are currently being judged by an impressive array of editors and agents—eek). Interesting, I found the first several chapters required the most tightening. Even though I revise as I go, until you’re deeper into the manuscript it’s often not easy to see what can be tightened or deleted in the beginning. It became evident that the more I grew to know my characters and discover the plot, the easier it has become to tighten as I write. This gives me hope for the remainder of the book, but no doubt when I finish I’ll find all sorts of areas in the chapters I’m writing now that can be tightened as well. It’s a can’t-see-the-trees-for-the-forest sort of thing, I guess.
Now I’m back into fast-drafting and revising new scenes, plus revising scenes that I fast-drafted back when I fast-drafted the whole manuscript in chunks. I had a big chunk of novel missing in the middle-to-end part that I’ve been working on writing these past several weeks. It’s interesting that a great number of the previously fast-drafted scenes I’m encountering as I proceed through the book STILL work. Others, I notice I’ve already used the information in new scenes and can delete the old ones. So, a bit of double-writing happening, but not enough to really annoy me.
Okay, that’s me. Who’s next?