Writing Writing Writing!

Yesterday I finished my second pass of the Great Queen & Tower Rewrite of 2015, getting all the way to the new ending I wrote on the last pass. I found myself thinking, Oh, yes, this is good! So that’s encouraging.

The third Great Rewrite Pass is already underway; that’s the pass where Mark reads a scene or two aloud to me, interrupting himself constantly to point out how terrible it is how to tweak it just a bit to make it even more spectacular. That pass is a little under halfway finished.

I’m about to begin another pass this morning–Pass Four? Pass Three-Prime? I have no idea at this point. This is the pass where I collapse the beginning sufficiently to get to the OH YES THIS SCENE, THIS ONE, IT IS AN AMAZING SCENE far sooner. And then continue on through the manuscript, adjusting all the things that will need fixing because of said collapse.

Oh and adding in all the tweaks based on the stuff we’re figuring out about the world, the characters, and all that, going forward.

When I am done with this, I will be ready to send it out to some “first” readers! (If we count Mark as Reader Zero.)

This book is SO different from the fluffy, overwritten 250,000-word manuscript that came out when I first sat down to write about a witch named Callie all those years ago. And yet the bones are still there. What the book is “about”–agency, independence, coming in to one’s own as a woman in this world, questions about love and connection–those are all still part of this story. But I hope it is on its way to becoming a lot more coherent now. (And, of course, entertaining, exciting, enjoyable–hey, one can hope!)

So that’s basically what I’ve been up to lately besides buying an excessive amount of office supplies from Office Depot to help feed my writing addiction. Well, along with freelance work, gardening, house guests, and doing all the Domestic Engineer stuff while Mark works 70-80 hours a week on Thimbleweed Park… 🙂

And it’s so nice to have a lovely place to write.