Endgame

All right. We're definitely in the end game now. I'm partway through Chapter 24, and have set up the outline so the book ends with Chapter 25. Problem: I'm already over budget for words on this book, as I've mentioned before. After I've finished the storyline, I need to go back through and cut, tighten and polish to try and get it down closer to 150,000 words. Pity I can't just make it 170,000 and not worry about it. It would still be a fast read even at that length. The trouble with my "revisions" is that when I revise, I tend to make things longer, because I add in the layers of detail like some of the tastes and scents that might not have been there before. I write lean in general, mostly because of having studied a book called "Write Tight" by William Brohaugh. It's a good resource for new writers, if you can still get it.

Word length aside, I'm really on the downstroke now. It's my first sequel, but the interesting part is that my first draft of this book has been a lot closer to the third draft of my previous book in quality. Follow that? In other words, I'm getting better at this gig, which means less revision if not faster output. After all, I did start a serious reorganization of this book at the beginning of August, one which involved a major rewrite of sections I'd already done, and a complete redo of the outline. So most of this book has been written over the past five months, and I'm almost done. That may be good news for fans some day, although I'm not sure I'll be able to do more than one book a year for a while yet. I'm still a mom, after all, and I have all these responsibilities, see? Yeah, whatever.

I'm having trouble getting back into the daily grind after the holidays. I'm still in holiday mode--that, and writing mode. Part of me wants to just hole up like some kind of hermit and focus on nothing but writing for the next week--just get the book done and forget all the rest. The other part of me...wants to go shopping. How Barbie of me, right? But I need to shop because I suddenly realized that I have nothing to wear. Really. I have a great business wardrobe, perfect for conferences and book tours, but my day-to-day wardrobe should have been featured on TLC's "What Not To Wear". So I'm going to fix it. Hmph. After all, I never appear in public as Frumpy Writer, so why should I be Frumpy Mom? What would happen if I were ever (gasp!) recognized on the street one day?

Ok, done with the Barbie moment. Back to the scene I'm working on, where my heroine must navigate through a tricky situation while hung over. Not so very Barbie at all. Especially with the CD player blaring out the soundtrack to "Alexander" by Vangelis. If that doesn't get us through all the booby traps, I'll put in X-Men.