Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Overslept--some progress

My weekly basketball game does a lot to erode my writing schedule. The pain afterward makes it hard to fall asleep, and I wake up very sore and without enough rest. And late today.

Still, I got in an hour of work. The good news is that when I'm short on time, I'm taking it out of other things (e.g. preparing for the class I teach tonight) and prioritizing the book. Too bad for my students.

Still on Chapter 1. Yesterday, one of the themes came into clearer relief for me and today I went to the scenes where it gets presented and revised/developed those.

Now I'm thinking two more days of work to finish up with Chapter 1. One to answer some questions about a secondary characters behavior so that one of the plot turns doesn't seem so mysterious and sudden. Another day to clean up some exposition and internal logic problems.

If so, that would mean three full weeks on Chapter 1 when I intended just one week. It certainly will be in a lot better shape than I intended. (And longer, though that's not necessarily a positive value.) More sentence-level revision got taken care of in the meantime than I had intended. So in theory then next rewrite/revision stage will require less.

But I really don't want then next 14 chapters to go this slowly. Hopefully the long struggle to straighten out Chapter 1 will pay dividends in making the necessary work in later chapters more obvious so I can tackle them quicker.

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