All over the place

The good news is that I'm putting a lot of time in--just about a full day today and more than a little bit over the weekend, too. The bad news is I'm undecided about how I should focus my time. Whether to circle back and clean up problems that I'm aware of or dive into Part II.

I haven't been having my wife read any of it lately, so I'm way behind on getting her perspective. Over the weekend she kindly agreed to read a couple chapters and this time I had her read them out loud to me. I was pleasantly surprised at how well developed and cohesive they sounded, and I was considerably cheered. We definitely spotted some problems that I spent this morning making some notes on, but I felt reassured that I wasn't hearing two chapters from different books, which has been my biggest fear lately.

Besides those notes, the other thing I did this morning was go quickly through all the chapters of Part II and review the notes that I have had there waiting for me. In general it looks like I have two strong chapters to start with--9 and 10--that I should be able to get through fairly quickly, and then I run into more serious problems. Starting with 11 and 12, I have characters acting like props, going where I need them to go for the sake of the plot, and it's not convincing.

With the rest of the day, I spent a lot of boring time on a sentence-level editing project I've been working on. More on that in another post.