Weird tired day

It's still pretty early and I've already done more than most days and am ready to go back to bed for awhile. I wrote before about the experience of waking up early with anxiety dreams (not necessarily about the novel) and taking the opportunity to get some good work done. It seems like I'm in a different kind of creative rhythm then. It's worked out so well that now instead of thinking "What the hell am I doing awake at 4 a.m." and dragging myself out of bed, now I'm like, "Alright! I had a nightmare! I can get some work done." That's how I popped out of bed this morning.

False economy probably. The doubled-up session today will probably be swapped with sleeping through the alarm tomorrow.

Today I got through the last of the chapters that I had marked for an extra cut. That took off 5 pages, plus another page I found late yesterday. So it stands at 394 pp. now, which I'm very pleased with. That's all the cuts for awhile except for random and accidental small adjustments until someone else reads it and persuades me I need to approach things differently.

Also this a.m. I've been working on some of the sentence-clean up, especially aspects of it that involve bringing the POV in a little closer to the main character by rewriting some bits of indirect report in free indirect style. That's an ongoing project, and I'm not sure I can wait to call a definite end to it before sharing the book with another reader.

The last major errand on my list is to go over a couple of the spots where I made some of the most significant revisions in the last few weeks and see if they feel right. They've never really been read in context. I'll do that when I'm fresh tomorrow, and then we'll see. I'm thinking I might be done with the 6th draft.