Carrying on as planned

Got the week off to an okay start. I'm in one of the sections of the book where I don't have a lot of notes about changes I need to make -- not that changes aren't needed, just that there were no obvious structural flaws that I noted as I went by in the first draft. So I'm really not doing much more than reading it over and making the few small changes that I did note.

As I go along, by the way, I make notes about things I need to work on in the next draft. I could work on them now, but they really are a different category of editing, and I don't want to be working on two different tracks. It would feel like frosting the third layer of the cake before the middle layer has come out of the oven.

So, I went flying by five of my note cards today (9% of the total) and 20 pages (about 6% of the total), which moves me closer to the end at a faster clip than my original schedule. Which has been true of every day so far. Add to that the fact that I am past the section that needs the most attention, and I really think my original plan of 6 weeks is way too conservative. I'm going to knock it down to 4 weeks, which would put at me at the end of this draft at Jan. 25. That's not a prediction, but a goal. My prediction is that I'll be done even sooner than that.

Which will be satisfying. The kind of thing I'm tackling in this draft is probably the least creative and artistic and intellectually stimulating and probably does the least to make the book actually any good. It's mostly about making it intelligible enough to work on. I'm looking forward to the next draft a lot more.