Carrying on

My work on the novel was erratic this week but not totally abandoned. I think I worked on it 3, maybe 4, days. Usually I was working quickly before some other appointment so I didn't have time for my customary unwinding on this blog. I got through the rewrite of Chapter 2 and started Chapter 3 yesterday.

One hard part has been ignoring how in a very basic way the book gets worse and worse as I go along. I'm making a mess out of it. But that's necessary work to sound the depth of it. So I just try to judge it by whether or not everything necessary is in there somewhere on the theory that I'll come back later to bring the important parts into clearer relief. I'm hoping that I've fully developed Chapters 1 and 2 finally and am close to doing that for Chapter 3.

By the way, I looked at the length of those first three chapters, and they are all three times as long as they were in the first draft. That's not counting all the scraps I've already cut out, which is usually around 10 pages/chapter or more. That means I'm on track to have about a 350,000 word second draft typescript--about 650-700 pages if it were all printed. Which it wouldn't be unless some publisher loses its mind. I have it in my head that this is about a 250 page story, so I'll have a lot of cutting to do.