Snooooooooooooow…

So we’re several hours into the latest Nor’easter, because apparently March is like, “It’s winter. Right? Right, guys? Winter? That’s still a thing, right? Here’s some snow!”

So far, we don’t even have enough on the ground to properly shovel, which is driving Bug absolutely nuts, and it’s driving me nuts, because Bug keeps asking every ten minutes if it’s time to shovel yet… I mean, I don’t really mind the snow so much. I’m a New England girl and it’d be nuts to totally hate snow up here. But that said, those few days the last couple of weeks where we had those beeeeautiful sixty-degree days? Yeah, that can come back and stay anytime.

Books, books, books, books, books…

I have a problem. That’s the first step, right? Admitting you have a problem?

Well, I do. And I blame my brother-in-law for setting me down this hard, cruel path, because he’s the one who introduced me to Thriftbooks.com. So, if you haven’t been introduced to this bewitching place, let me just say: many books are around the $3.75 mark, and if you buy $10 worth of books, shipping is free.

FREE.

So that’s like, three books, and it’s free shipping, and this has been THE WORST thing for me to discover, because now anytime I want any book at all, I look on Thriftbooks first, and then add like five more books I wasn’t intending to buy yet, and there we go. A PROBLEM. Needless to say, I’ve added quite a few books to my collection now, but I will say, it’s kind of awesome for acquiring research-related books when I don’t want to spend a fortune. Also, I now think of books in $10 blocks…

Into the Chasm…

So as March, I’ve started the read-through of the novel’s 2nd draft/summary. It’s about forty pages of stream-of-consciousness, and at this point I’m just reading through to get the flow of the story back into my head and to map out the scenes and timeline. I’m about half-way done, and I gotta say, I’m having a lovely time. The story’s got some significant gaps I still need to address, but the overall flow and structure is SO. MUCH. BETTER. than the first draft. I’m optimistic. After I get this thing mapped out, my next step–I think–will be to make a problem list I need to fix, and then translate all the various scenes onto index cards to enable some combining/swapping and to stick new scenes and info in where needed. Once that’s done and organized (hopefully by the end of the month?), then I’ll start the actual prose-drafting of Draft 2.