Well, this was certainly a week! Not necessarily a good week, though I’m sure it could have been worse by a lot. School started remotely for us here, which has–surprisingly–been awesome so far. B-Bug loves it, and the school has done a great job keeping even 1st Graders on-task and entertained.
Meanwhile, Goldbug has been toothing like crazy. Fountains of drool, major cranks, and sporadic and unstable naps, which–as you’d expect–means I’ve not gotten any deep, concerted work done this week. THAT SAID, I did get a chunk of a retyping (which has turned into a rewriting) done on “Langwidere,” on Saturday when I did a virtual write-club with a friend of mine. Oh, that was lovely. Even if I ended up writing about 2x too much on a scene that should have been a brief cut-away, but it was still progress. I am a little stuck on it, though, so we’ll see where I can get that to go next.
Mostly, I spent this past week rehashing and re-mental-mapping my needs-to-be-edited novel draft (working title: “Frosthaven”) based on the self-paced course by Angela Slatter and Pamela Freeman via the Australian Writer’s Centre (they’ve got some amazing self-paced courses, and online courses, and I’ve had it first hand from them that if you’re cool to get on the computer despite the time difference, international students are allowed to take the live classes, too! Cut, Shape, Polish–the novel editing course–I picked up on sale last weekend). I’ve always known this book was going to need a lot of heavy-lift editing, but I could never pinpoint what I needed to focus on. Remove characters? Fix the plot? Re-envision the entire core idea? I was L-O-S-T, so I avoided it. Coming back with the Cut, Shape, Polish course in hand, I at least feel justified in WHAT needs to be done, and now that their very step-by-step process has led me to similar conclusions, I know WHY I felt certain things needed to change. In the past few years, I’ve done tons of re-considering/re-writing of the story/backstories/etc., so thankfully I can pick and choose the best of the reworks. Now it’s just a matter of implementing (which is haaaaaaard…. *cries & whines*).
Did do some reading this week, too, so not a lost week, but a fractured-thinking week. I’m tempted to make a huge inspiration collage–I was going to do it on my current notebook, but now I’m thinking it might be cool to gradually expand it out across my whole bulletin board, BUT…I don’t know. I’m waffling on the commitment. Maybe if the teething calms down for a bit…
Maggie Slater 