OK, so it got a little easier last week.
It took me a while to figure out a meaningful way to keep track of my progress on the Petra rewrite. Word count is kinda meaningless at this stage, unless I’m writing a new scene. So I’m going by page count instead.
I figure that in order to finish the rewrite by the end of the year, I need to get through 50 pages of manuscript per week. Roughly. The novel’s total page count is, of course, in flux, so this is a moving target. But I did manage to get through fifty pages last week. It was dicey for a while there, but I hit a patch of relatively smooth going, after having wrangled the opening into a semblance of something interesting.
I’ve noticed that much of the novel is still foreign to me. That is, when I begin a new chapter or even a new scene, I find myself needing to skim through it first, just so I can remember what actually happens in that part of the book. That’s a little weird. With my first two novels, I got so intimately familiar with every part of them that I could very quickly locate any bit I needed. Of course, this novel was written quickly, and has only been complete since May. And I ignored it for a couple of months after that. So it and I haven’t really had a whole lot of time to get acquainted. But that’s changing.
I hope it likes me. And vice versa.
Write Club update: BFOD from Realms of Fantasy, for “The Woman Who Hated Halloween.” Response time, about three weeks.
Onward . . .
