What next?

I've taken a few days off, but I've had the urge to get back to it. I'm really tempted to print it out and start doing some line editing--to see if I can start making it zip a little better at the sentence level--but it's probably too soon. It still needs some basic revision. I'm getting close, though, and I might indulge myself with that soon.

I looked through the Word doc today. I use the comments feature in Word to make notes along the way of things that I need to come back to and deal with, and I have about 20 of those. Some of them are fairly simple things that don't require a lot of intellectual energy--e.g. checking the details on a bus stop that I suspect has been described in two different ways on two different mentions of it.

A handful of those notes, though, require more serious attention--scenes that still feel like they aren't going anywhere; characters acting in some hidden corner of the story as if they don't have the same motivation that has been developed for them in the rest of the book. These are issues that have nagged along the way and I need to bear down and focus at last.

So, my plan is to start this Thursday (after a work deadline), fresh in the morning, and put in regular a.m. working sessions, tackling them one at time as best as I can. I hope to spend less than two weeks on this phase. (Another work deadline looms after April 15 and I'll need to give my first-thing-in-the-morning energy to that.)

Depending on what I decide about line editing at this stage, that could bring me to an end of draft 6.