All the Billion Other Moments

Do not disturb

Here we are, halfway through January 2010 and I’ve barely made a dent working my way through the last few steps of novel revisions.  There are many reasons for this, but excuses aside, I’m feeling frustrated and disappointed with the whole thing at this point.

So rather than whine about it, I’m doing something about it.  A few days ago I noticed that today was empty on the family calendar.¹  I promptly fixed this my writing in “Jay writing day”.  I expected to get some push-back on this, but I didn’t get any.²

So it’s time to put up or shut up.  The seven hundred other things that need my attention are all on hold while I try to plow through as much of this as possible today.  I’m hoping to move that progress meter all the way to the end, and get as far as I can on a “last” proofread.

I’ll be updating the progress bar on the right sidebar³ and posting updates on twitter⁴, and I’ll do my best to post an update tonight on how far I made it.

Wish me luck!

1. it may in fact have been the only empty day in all of January [↩]
2. At least once I promised it wouldn’t affect our weekly ritual of watching an episode of the Muppet Show after dinner as a family [↩]
3. non-mobile site [↩]
4. unless it becomes a distraction [↩]

This weekend I allowed myself to do something I haven’t done in at least six months: Relax. It felt really nice, and I should probably do it more often than I do.  Still, books don’t revise themselves, so I thought I’d outline my “what’s left” list.

Placeholders

When I’m writing I’ll often find a that a new character or idea I haven’t yet given a name to will show up. In the old days I used to stop there until I figured out the name of the character/town/whatever, and then keep going. This really didn’t work very well¹ as it would stop me in my tracks, so I started bracketing placeholders off so I could find them quickly later and just keep going. It’s how I end up with fairly major characters known only as “[Someone]”. ²

I have a 743 of these currently in the manuscript, although less than 200 are unique. So my very next step is to finalize all these and get my [placeholders] out of there.

Another Read Through

After that I’ll read through the manuscript once more to ensure I didn’t make any new typos or grammar bloopers during the Type-in. I’m hoping this is relatively quick.

Then What?

This is the point where I have someone else read the manuscript, and get some feedback. I’ll admit I’m a bit skittish. After getting the feedback on my first novel I decided to “trunk” it.³ Still, I didn’t spend all this time writing a book for no one to read, so I need to know if it is a book no one would want to read or not.

1. especially during NaNoWriMo [↩]
2. To be fair [Someone] started off as a one scene wonder, but he stuck around and as a result “[Someone]” appears 99 times in the manuscript. [↩]
3. put it aside and pretend it doesn’t exist for a while [↩]