I’d like to say that sometimes being sick allows me to slow down and reconfigure my priorities, but at this point today the only thing I’m really contemplating is whether I should get up from my latest nap or just turn right around and go back to sleep.
The only good thing about getting this sick is that I do actually give myself permission to let go of things. (If I’m on the fence, it generally means I can probably get something done. If I’m like I am today, I don’t have much choice, really. How do I know this? If I can’t even get the energy up to play WoW, I’m sick. Period.)
*ahem*
Before the sick-fest, I did manage to get some revision stuff done on Saturday – I went through about 150 pages or so. And for the first run through of revisions, I’m not actually doing any editing – it’s more of an overview where I spread out the pages of the manuscript and go to town with my post its. I take a red pen and make notes of where I need to add things, or take things out, or if I need to move a section somewhere else. It doesn’t do me any good to actually start doing any real editing until I’ve got the entire road-map laid out. If I start changing things at the beginning, and then get toward the end and I realize I no longer need that beginning section, then all I’ve done is waste time.
A good deal of what I need to do is lay down the groundwork from the first book – things that new readers wouldn’t know if they didn’t read the first, or that people may have forgotten from the first book. I don’t usually write those things down on my first set of drafts because I don’t want to get bogged down in things *I* already know. In theory, the addition of a few lines here or there, or a subtle description should be enough to fill in the blanks.
The last third of the book is going to be the hardest for me, I think, since I got a little off track. I’m fine with the overall ending, but how I get there is a bit more convoluted than I would like it to be, so that’s going to require some major brainstorming on my part. It’s entirely possible I may cut out a huge chunk of it and just rewrite it from scratch, though that’s a little more extreme than I’d like to do.
Still – when it comes to writing, sometimes that is what is required.
Since my brain is mostly mush today, I suspect I’ll just spend the time contemplating various scenarios and see what comes up.
On a completely unrelated note? A Brush of Darkness is apparently a candidate for the Compton Crook Award. 🙂 (Got a nice email the other day about it, so yay!)
