I bought a dozen composition notebooks in different colors for Project Notebooks rather than my habitual Compost Heap of Ideas, which eventually requires a full day to organize before it reaches critical mass. I cleaned my “desk” (the dining room table), which involved organizing and culling the latest Compost Heap of Ideas, kept a scratch pile of all the culled loose papers that were clean on one side to jot down things that are not Projects, and put my pristine notebooks upright in a basket within easy reach. My expectations aren’t set at “life-changing,” but “some portion of important things easier to find in a sustainable system” would be groovy.
208 rough draft pages have become 330 revised pages.
Pedants in the audience will be pleased to know I changed “one less” to “one fewer,” despite its occurrence in dialogue, where I’m inclined to let people be imperfect. Savor it! It will probably be the only bone I deign to throw you.[efn_note]For those who don’t know and would like to: “fewer” applies to countable items. “Less ketchup, fewer fries” is the easiest memory jogger for me. That said, I’m not going to scold anyone about it under almost any circumstances. I sometimes yell corrections at commercials, but the people who made them aren’t going to be embarrassed into silence by the Copyeditor Harpy’s screech, so no harm there.[/efn_note]
I made up for it by using “out-of-placeness” later. The sentence in question needs to become a paragraph to cover all its bases, but I’m not yet in the headspace for prose refinement that isn’t dead easy.
Here we meet the final character in this book who will be a future series main character. One of them doesn’t make an appearance in this story, but Heroine has bounced off everyone else who will tackle their portion of the overarching plot. They were all involved before she got to them, whether they knew it or not, but now their futures are linked to what Heroine and Hero accomplish.
Also here, Heroine realizes she maybe wanted a future with Hero… half a second after he proposes a course of action that will eliminate the possibility of a future together. She can’t really process her emotions at the moment because they’re in a nest of vipers and surviving to complete their quest is all that matters. Perhaps in the very near future, these unexamined feels will affect her decision making, but who can say? *whistles*
This section zoomed past. Possibly because I didn’t do a thorough job? But I predict this final stretch will remain a bit wibbly until I’ve gone through again and smoothed the road leading to it, and then there will eventually be a round of revision dedicated to bringing the final 20% up to the same level as what came before, prose-wise. It’s sound plot-wise, even if the wording is less than dazzling. I just need to immerse in the vocabulary and tone before I can direct the flow through to the end. The amount of work in the first Big Revision makes the process too choppy to sink deeply into the story. When the work is light enough to get through 50 pages in a day, The Great Smoothening should commence.