Thanksgiving 2017

In the lead up to Thanksgiving I found myself swamped with things, and while I wrote a post, I didn’t have time to go through the 3+ drafts I need to do to get something I write ready to publish.

That post is now on the back burner because I wanted to talk about what I’ve been doing with my writing. And that is, I hired a freelance editor to take a look at the Law of the Prince Charming. One of the main results was that I put the Huntsman aside to come back to LotPC. Two major changes were that I took out a major plot thread that required some reworking and added in another plot thread that required more reworking. These changes ended up going more smoothly than I thought they would, not that there weren’t scenes I had to pull apart at the seams. There were also a number of smaller changes like shoring up Tabitha and her mother’s motivations throughout the story and strengthening the theme.

I made one pass where I added in the rough changes I needed to, and now I’m in the middle of a revision pass where I am smoothing out the sharp edges the additions created and seeing if there is anything else I need to add. I’ll be going into more detail about what my experience in getting more professional feedback was like in this month’s newsletter, so sign up here if you’re interested.

Thanksgiving also happened since I last wrote a journal post. I spent far more time visiting with family than I did working on my story. I only felt guilty some of the time. It was quite the enjoyable holiday. I ate way too much, enjoyed time with family, and avoided any and all political discussion at the table.

My plan from here out: Get this revision pass done by Sunday morning. Then I can spend the afternoon on the rough draft of that post I mentioned.

NaNoWriMo

It occurs to me that writing a blog post while doing NaNoWriMo is just extra work. I have enough trouble convincing myself to do it when I am not trying to write 2400 words a day, because the weekends is when I have the most time to sit down and work on my writing.

I am certainly hitting the same wall I did before with the second half of my book, but having the word requirement means that I just pound out words and I get a few gems. I guess I’m annoyed that I have to write so many superfluous words to get to the good stuff, but I am happy that I am getting any good stuff.

Not much is happening in the rest of my life because I am spending most of my free time writing. Oh, but I am finishing up Christmas gifts for the hubby’s family since we’re going there for Thanksgiving, so we exchange gifts early. I love shopping for gifts.