Coco is going HAM right now on her Whimzy stick. So hard! It’s these sticks we give them at night that help to keep their teeth clean and their breath smelling fresh…though it doesn’t help Coco one bit. She has stinky breath all the times.
Liz just got up to grab something from outside the bedroom, and covered up Coco when she flung aside the covers and now I’m seeing this bump moving around underneath them. I love my dogs! So sue me.
I have big goals for this week. Goddamn do I have big goals. 25 pages a day (except for Thursday which is a golfing day) from here on out until this fucker is all edited down to typing times.
I had a breakthrough on that front, which is that I go through each scene four times –once each for plot, character, setting, and other– and pay attention to what is on that section’s post-it ONLY for that pass. I move along much, much faster in this manner as opposed to what I was doing before, reading the scene through from the beginning to the end and fixing everything as I went along. Reading it that way led to a lot of…fixing what wasn’t broken…revising for revising-sake. And, I’ve learned, that is a recipe for stalling out on a rewrite, getting overwhelmed, getting discouraged, etc.
So, yeah…25 pages a day. If I can muster that for the next 9 or 10 days…I’ll be fucking excited as shit. And here’s the thing: I can do it. I know I can. It’ll be hard, sure, but I know I can do it.
Then I type all this shit into the Scrivener document.
Then I print the beast out one more time, and I get to do line edits for prose that sounds like shit. And punctuation and stuff, kinda. But not really. I’ll TRY to do that as much as I can, but my own line edits are for flow and clarity, not for comma splices and typos.
AND THEN…I send it off to an editor to get a sense of where I’m at. God, it will be hard to hear if it’s way, way far away from being finished. But, I want the truth. I will have taken it as far as my current skills allow me to take it…from there, I’ll have to learn from the experts and try to get better. So, I guess in the end, it won’t be hard to hear there – it will be educational. See…I know I can do it, I just need to be shown the way.
Today was a lovely day. Laundry, writing, watching of footballs, work…it was a smattering of it all, really.
That’s all I got for you tonight. Off to read, or play some SimCity. We’ll see.
Also, I still love love LOVE my new computer. It’s fast.