Woke up at 5, a little slow getting out of bed, but coffee and breakfasted by 6, out to writing shed by 6:15. Gods, I love the mornings out here. So beautiful, so peaceful.
There was a little break from novel-revision when I had to pause and work on my revised outline for the next Wild Cards book — it’s a mosaic novel, with several co-writers, so there’s a flurry of e-mail discussion back and forth, plotting, and then we all go away and revise our pieces, and then send them to George and Melinda, who try to put them back together into something coherent. This third pass, I think we’re getting pretty close to a final shape for the book, fingers crossed.
It’s fascinating — this must be a little of what it’s like being in a TV writers’ room. Difficult, in lots of ways, but there’s also delight, when a co-writer comes up with something splendid and unexpected. Ideas sparking.
As for my novel, I’m finding my beta readers’ comments helpful — they helped me realize that I needed to flesh out a character, so yesterday and this morning, I wrote a few more new scenes that I’m pretty happy with, about 2500 new words. (Regular readers of this page may recognize a little of what’s in the attached scene from a post a few weeks ago. 
)
I’m not QUITE sure what the next step should be — it’s very very tempting to race ahead to the ending (VERY), but various people have been sending me edit notes, and I kind of think it would be even better to go back and start implementing those. Most are very small fixes, and I think putting those in will help me make sure that everything is clean and in place as we come up to the climax.
Yes, I think that’s right. So not finishing the book today, or tomorrow. That’s okay. I gave myself ’til Monday the 17th, so there’s still plenty of time. It will likely be down to the wire, per usual in my life…
But hey, the new scenes meant that I moved some chapters around after that point, so I still somehow managed to get another chapter ahead in my revision count. That’s satisfying in a purely silly way.
Chapters revised: 1-20
Total novel word count: 78,776
