March 24, 2006
Bad News, Good News

So the bad news is that I've just missed my self-imposed deadline of wrapping up my revision of the novel by March 23rd. The good news is that I've been working on it steadily and I'm up to page 175. The new deadline is this weekend.

Feel free -- nay, encouraged -- to mock me mercilessly if I miss the new deadline.

Also, I want to take a moment to celebrate fixing two of the three most dysfunctional sections of the book. As usual the solution was surgical: a deceptively simple nip and tuck in the first section of Chapter 1 (which was already just about entirely rewritten since the last time anyone read it), and a major tangentectomy in Chapter 13. The chop in Chapter 13 knocks the book back into the wasteland between novella and marketable-length novel, but I can't worry about that now. It had to done.

The next big challenge is an underwritten section in Chapter 16, so cutting won't fix it. Wish me luck.