Setback

Over the weekend I printed out and had my wife read my fabulous chapter one, which now doesn't seem so fabulous. This raises the interesting process question of when to have people read the work and who I should have read it. I'll discuss that another time, but suffice it to say that in having my wife read it at this stage I'm going against a lot of expert advice.

After that I realized that the chapter not only has all the flaws I was aware of, it's not nearly as developed as I imagined it was. That's very disappointing to learn, but necessary.

So the challenge I have is deciding whether it's better to get right with that now or leave it for later and keep plowing forward. There's a real risk of working on this chapter until I've killed all momentum. But it's possibly a lot more effective to get the best understanding possible of what my story is (which is what really happens in this development work) before going on and making a hash of the next chapter. Get my attention as focused as possible.

I'm leaning toward staying with Chapter 1, and that's what I did today. I worked on the final scene in the chapter. Developing it. I have some ideas of how I need to do that in other scenes in the chapter.

I worked less than an hour today. Partly no stamina, partly lack of sleep, and partly I have a lot of work on my mind because I've been procrastinating.

It's so hard to keep honoring the gift of this time to work and to take full advantage of that. I console myself by remembering how much time over the weekend I spent just thinking about it.