7%!!! I know that probably seems very small to you but that seems very large to me. Considering we are only 11% ish done with the year, I am darn close to being on pace.

But the potato is in distress because my writing, it mocks me.

My health, it also mocks me as I have been battling and unpleasant cold which I hope to finally get over this week. For a few days there I really hated life but I managed to work through it and, with the exception of a small break to play The Sims, didn’t take any time off so yay me!

But back to the writing. The one thing that I think shows the most growth in me as a writer is, when I was younger, when I would read something I had written that I thought was terrible, I would go all emo and not write for weeks.

Now, I read something of mine, decide it is terrible and basically shrug and keep going. You should see my edits, they are somewhat hilarious. I have a tendency to write things like “This part sucks” or just circle a whole section and write “God awful” or “ugh” next to it which you’d think would be discouraging but its not, I just keep on trucking on.

Dory from Finding Nemo was some kind of writing sage. Just keep swimming. It’s deep, man.

The one constant in my edits is that for every section I decide is terrible, there is another section that is much less terrible than expected which is always a plus. Also, there isn’t one thing I’ve come across yet that I don’t know how to fix which is great. This way, if I read something terrible, I know it’s only temporary.

The only section I got totally and completely stuck on I managed to work through by journalling as my character which is such a writer geek sentence that I apologize for making you read it. But it really seriously worked so I am giving serious consideration to doing it more often when I get stuck. I won’t even try to explain to you what I was trying to fix, you just need to know that it worked. I now am a fan of journalling as characters and recommend it.

I am exactly 3 chapters away from the end of my book on this first go through (I intend to finish them tonight literally seconds after I post this. Yes, at 1 AM, why?). As part of this first go through, I am dealing with a printed out manuscript of the whole book because I wanted to force myself to go through the whole thing before I started hacking at it. So doing it on paper forces me to mostly read and not muck with it more than just notes and crossing things out. I’m very resistant to this method because every time I read something that needs to be changed I …want…to…change….it….that….second! But I already know that when I try to edit that way, I just end up changing and re-changing things because I forget what happens later so this is forcing me to look at the project as a whole. Hopefully, this will mean less drafts. Hopefully.

Good news is that I like a lot of what I wrote. There are parts I banged out in a half asleep NaNoWriMo stupor that I thought were pure trash that are actually rather good (and, of course, parts I remember as being awesome that are terrible). But overall, the news is positive. I like my book and I cannot wait to make it better so I can unleash it on people that aren’t me.

About that. See, I asked two of my besties to read my book recently because I really thought I would have a solid second draft by now. (If you are a bestie who was not asked yet, do not be offended, there are going to be waves so different people are reading different drafts. More on that later.)  I am close with the first pass through but I need to go back and incorporate all my changes from this printed-stage into the version of the book that is on the computer which is going to takes much, much more time than this first pass through.

My brilliant plan was to finish the second draft in time for my husband (not a big reader) to read on our upcoming vacation. Then I was going to come back from vacation fresh and rested, incorporate all of his changes and then hand what would then be my third draft to my lovely and sexy reader besties. Then I would incorporate their changes, pass that draft on to the next group of readers and so on and so forth until I had the ultimate awesome draft of my book.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of work to be done before I leave on vacation and being sick slowed me down so I am not sure if this plan will come to fruition on the timetable I envisioned. Pass through #1 will be done (tonight!!) and while I’m going to use every spare second that I can snag to work on the more work pass through #2, I am, at heart, a realist and I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to finish the whole thing before vacation as I have several much more pressing projects. But we shall see, as they say.

My husband is the designated first readers because, having had to sit there and listen to me talk out plot point after plot point, he is the only person besides me that knows what the book is supposed to be about and what is supposed to be happening. Thus he is a fresh but still informed pair of eyes. I am excited to have him read it because I think it will be much better in written form than my babbling about it would indicate so he should be pleasantly pleased. Am mildly terrified about letting non-husband type people read it but I’m hoping that fear will subside once I have a shiny polished draft that I am eager to show off.

I’m a bit annoyed that I have no ability to estimate how long things will take me. I thought the first pass through would take under a week and while it literally was about 8 hours of editing total, finding those 8 hours around all the other work I had to do was brutal. How I wish you could just pause real life sometime, eh?

There are just about 20 chapters in my book. If I did 2 chapters a day… eh but editing is so much harder to plan. I can spend four hours on reworking one scene sometimes if its a tough scene and three seconds on 20 pages if it’s mostly good. So it’s not like work count where I know my average speed and can plan accordingly.

But before I leave you to go finish the first pass through of my book, I leave you this this thought. Look over this post. I did not start a single sentence with the word “so.” I think this was because I had forgotten all about my little habit and when it wasn’t on my mind, I didn’t feel like writing it quite as much.

Hmmm… food for thought.

Anyway, allegedly, we are getting snow tomorrow. I will believe it when i see it. In the meantime, I have a story to hack at.