About Those Pants
It's not over yet, but I passed the halfway point in this round of revisions. The pants are starting to fit as they should. "Wie angegossen," as a clerk once told me in a store in Vienna. She meant that what I was trying on fit as if it were poured onto me--not in the sense of skin tight, but as if it were made for me alone. Believe me, I have never worn skin-tight.
While I was at it this
turned into
How'm I doing?
In terms of numbers, I managed to lose 3,000 words. That pleases me, but it's not the most important thing.
In terms of progress, not a hair has been torn out. No nails were bitten (an accomplishment, since I was a nailbiter for decades). There were days when I didn't get as much done as I had planned (not hoped or expected, but planned), but I made sure I left off when I had an idea of what exactly had to be done next. Sometimes that meant knowing that I didn't have enough time left in a writing session to be able to get all the way to the next logical stopping point.
Those were the days when I was combining things from multiple places in the manuscript, or condensing five mini-scenes that inched the story forward into one scene that took a definitive stride, all in the service of giving this story the best shape possible.
Somewhere along the way I realized that many of the PostIts inside the cover of the binder will need to be revisited when this pass reaches the end of the manuscript.
The vertically oriented hot-pink strip is a list of words I need to track down and eliminate. But not when I'm focused so tightly on story.
In case you're wondering about the calendar--I use calendars for plotting, especially when there are recurring events that need to mesh with the larger story. I also use weather data. Both of these are in the service of keeping my fictional world as real as possible.
Now that I've passed this mile-marker, I'm going to celebrate. I'm thinking a bit of poetry tutelage under the direction of Stephen Fry might be just the thing. Oh, and steak for supper. But I already had that planned. Chocolate for dessert, though, that wasn't on the menu.