So I’ve been gone from here for a while, but not from writing. Even on my wonderful Disney Cruise to the Caribbean I spent about five hours one day people watching and working on my novel.
What I have been working on was giving my novel a complete read through after all of the changes I made as a result of my first beta read. I just finished this past weekend, and let me tell you, I am somewhat impressed with myself. I really had a lot of times when I doubted my ability to finish something, and now here I am, within spitting distance of the end. My “To Fix’ file isn’t even a whole page.
So my list right now is:
1) Go over the fight scenes once more with my husband. (2 weeks)
2) Finish my ‘To Fix’ list. (1 week)
3) Go through and fix the prose I marked that doesn’t flow. (2 weeks)
4) Print out the entire novel and line edit. (1 week)
5) Beta read #2 by Oct 15th (Which is when I go to a writing conference.)
Which is cutting it a little tight. Especially, I think, for #3 (It occurs to me only now that I’m not sure I’m allowed to use the pound sign to denote ‘number’ anymore. Hashtag 3!) but at the same time I am giving myself the deadline. It might be best to work on that one from the end of the book forward, since the beginning of the book is generally cleaner.
It also occurs to me that I should be looking into agents I want to query. When I thought it would take me until the beginning of the year to finish, I kept putting it off. How exciting!
