Progress Report

I've come to realize that if I want to keep doing blog posts during these last few weeks, I'll have to content myself with posting mostly progress reports. I have no spare brain cells or time to contemplate much of anything else.

In addition to revisions, I'm also supposed to be cutting words: from 210,000 down to about 185,000. I would rather just concentrate on the revisions and then do a cutting down pass after that, because trying to do them together can be distressing. Like when I just spent the last several days turning chapter 25 into chapters 25A & B -- kicking and screaming as I did so but it had to be done. The section is pivotal, and now significantly rewritten, which means it's probably also pretty wordy. I can hope anyway. Before I expanded 25 into two chapters, I had the word count down to 198,000, but A & B shot it back up to 201,000. So then having gone through all the turmoil and mental labor of writing two chapters and having it going pretty well, you can still end up disappointed.

But that, too, is God's problem, not mine. And yesterday, happily, I went through chapter 27 and cut about 2000 words. My current word count is 199,679. I'll be reworking chapter 29 tonight and probably tomorrow. This is just Abramm's thread. I've not yet looked at Maddie's or any of the others. And I dare not contemplate the list of chapters yet to be done. Just carry on, business as usual -- okay, a bit more intense and focused and sustained than usual -- and do the next thing.

Karen