More new drafting

More of the same as yesterday. 1,300 new words in one spurt of a little over an hour. It's just like drafting last summer in that I seem to get lost in imagining it, I end up taking it place I didn't intend and once I bring a scene to end I have a feeling of exhaustion that makes it hard to start up a new scene regardless of how much or little time I have actually put in or if I actually moved the story to where I had planned on that day.

So I often end up with a feeling that I'm still pretty far from finishing the chapter, and that's what today is like. I have to remember that even if my work doesn't stick closely to my intentions it's still probably important work. I'm discovering things about the characters and finding new ways to show how they are.

With all of this deliberate new drafting and the way that material tends to accumulate less deliberately during the rewriting, the draft is getting to be pretty long. I haven't tallied it all up, but it has to be around 170,000 words total now, which is somewhere around 500-550 typescript pages. And that's with only having worked on the first three chapters out of 15 during the rewriting stage. There's going to be a lot of work to cut it down to what really works.

(If only it were that simple. Whenever I cut something for being mostly unnecessary there will still be some little details that are necessary and it will take time and intellectual energy to figure out how to include that somewhere.)

One other unimportant note for the record: Yesterday afternoon after blogging about my day's work I ended up going back and working some more. I think I added about 2,500 words total yesterday.