Late night writing

I'm trying to self-soothe a little bit. A lot of the anxiety I'm feeling is coming just from expectations about my schedule, and those expectations are probably arbitrary and unreasonable. In the last draft, 2 days or more per chapter was customary and now because I had a good run of a chapter per day the last couple weeks I have sugar-plum visions of being finished by X date. Whenever I fall behind that pace, I think I start to transmutate it into worry about problems in the text itself. The text does have problems, but I don't have to feel this wound up about them.

So, last night was weird. I couldn't sleep and at about 12:30 a.m. a solution for how to connect some of the parts of these chapters I'm working on came to me. Really, it was just the transitional sentence that helped organize a couple different chunks. So I leaped out of bed and opened my sleeping laptop and typed in the sentence, and then pasted in the text I wanted, and then continued the cut and paste work that I was writing about yesterday. I put in about an hour and then was too wound up to go right to sleep and am of course sleep deprived this morning.

Needless to say, that was not a customary working hour for me, but it illustrates just how preoccupied I am with the book at this point. Zoned out, is how I think of it. I want to say more about that in another post.

Page count -- the transitional sentence allowed me to bring back in some of that background material for the time being, so I'm back up to 46 pp. from 42 yesterday. That's for the three chapters 9 - 11 together. I'm considering now a plan C where Ch. 9 stands on its own as a comparatively short 18 pp. (the shortest in the book) and 10 and 11 are combined for the remainder, which right now is 28 pp. We'll see. I still have a lot of big picture work to do on 10 and 11 and then finer crafting to do on all of it.