Writing Musings

It seems as though all of my time is consumed with painstaking revisions of the work in progress. I’m usually not this late, but, well, I’d thought to have it turned over to my publisher by the end of November and here it is the first week of February. Page by page it’s getting there, and this problematic secondary arc is getting more and more flesh on it.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I can learn from this slow-down so I don’t make the same mistake next time, and I’m scratching my head a little. I’ve written before about my new outlining process, which was certainly a success, because it allowed me to get the initial draft down. None of the major beats have changed, which means the process worked. Where I failed myself was in properly fleshing things out moving forward from the outline phase, and I’ve had to go back again and again to get everyone sounding right, to string the events together more tightly, and to punch up the action scenes.

I’ve been saying I was close to turning it over for months now, but I think this time I may finally be only a week or so out. Then I hope to finishing sorting a bunch of junk in the basement — which won’t be much fun — and playing some of those great solitaire boardgames in the evenings, which will be.