Finished Sample

Having cleared the world’s thorniest sex scene hedge (and there is enough distance between writing it and now that I can say, yeah, I got it!), I am forging ahead in my rewrite at a good clip. I am up over 10,000 words, or a tenth of the novel at its post-diet word count projection. That is basically the section a prospective reader would be able to sample before being forced to commit to buying it. Word is still out from the friend I sent it to as to whether she’d buy based on that section, but I can say this – I would.

I am actually quite pleased with how things are coming together. I have a lot of love for this story and these characters (I’ve spent over three years with them, now, off and on but never entirely out of mind), and getting into these revisions was hard because I felt like I had made so many mistakes in the rough draft. It’s an intimidating amount to have to correct. But now that I am in the thick of it, I am enjoying the act of re-visioning. I have a lot of great material, if I can just cut away the excess obscuring it. I have a lot of themes I am layering in, and the whole is going to be like romance novel baklava.

The list of work to be done is still a mile long. It is still too much to hold in my mind at once. But the parts that have been edited excite me. The parts that need to be written excite me. I can’t wait to get this one finished and out in the world so everyone can enjoy it, most of all me, and that is hugely inspiring to put in the time after my husband and baby are in bed for the night to keep working.

After all, well begun is half done – and I am definitely started.