Hello friends. I don’t have a ton to tell you about this week, but what I do have is good. The new daily writing habit continues and persists, as does my restored enthusiasm. It’s been so joyous to feel the love of writing in my bones again. I’d missed it.
My daily progress is still small and slow, but every day I’m making gains and my goal of having a finished manuscript for next year’s CanCon is feeling obtainable. The first section of my book has been massively changed, but I do really feel it’s for the better. The original beginning of the novel was very slow, mostly world building with little in terms of actual events. It also had a lot of unnecessary repetition. The new beginning isn’t yet much shorter than the original (though I think that may change as I get into the next little bit of it) but I think it has more tension, more action, better characterization and much less repetition. We’ll see how my writing group reacts to the story now, but I’m feeling good about it.
The best part, for me, and the small victory my title refers to, is that I think I’ve now moved out of the heavy rewrites (at least for now). While I think the next section still needs a lot of work, I also think a lot more of it is salvageable in its current form with only minor rewrites and cutting of extraneous things. I consider this a victory because the knowledge of how much I had to rewrite in this first section was a serious factor in my struggles to get moving on it. Getting past this section was a huge hurdle for me, both mentally and in terms of time and effort spent.
It took me a lot longer than I wanted to get to point of being able to begin the rewrites, and I do still lament the lost time. I’m not wallowing in that though, which is also a nice change of pace for me. I’m so pleased to be back in a place of daily writing and it’s a joy to see these little bits of progress turn into 35 pages of a better beginning. I’m feeling too good now to feel bad about how bad I felt before, which seems like a not-so-small victory in and of itself. Small, consistent progress day-to-day definitely doesn’t make for the most exciting of blog updates, but if you’ve followed this much of the journey with me, hopefully you can feel a bit of that victory too and forgive it being a little boring.
