Easing back into it

I'm feeling ambivalent about starting the next draft for the same reason I waited this long -- I'm waiting to hear from my reader, which should be any day now, and I don't want to get ahead of her, starting to identify and tackle problems without the benefit of her critique. I'm trying to find meaningful work to do that won't put me in that position.

So, two short sessions yesterday. First, I took all the comments from another one of my readers of this draft -- let's call them R1, R2, and R3 -- I took R2's draft, which basically only had line edits and corrections on it, and went through and made most or all of those changes. Grunt work, but necessary, and it had the benefit of reacquainting me with the book a little. Easing back into it, like I say.

Second, I took the first four chapters and started to ponder and outline the big changes that R1's feedback tells me I have to deal with. R3 might still steer my thinking another way, but a little bit of outlining can't hurt, and I'm pretty well persuaded that there is a structural problem here that needs to be dealt with.

On the other hand, R1 thinks there are several other structural problems in later chapters, but I'm less convinced about those, so that's the kind of thing where I want to hear from R3 first before trying to figure it out.

That leaves me with not much to do today. We'll see what the mail brings today and then decide how to proceed. I may have to start working on those first four chapters before getting all the feedback.