Life Intrudes, but life is good, so that's ok

Just noticed we haven't posted for a while. Daily living makes it rough sometines to keep up these little side issues.

We finished, successfully. YAY! Now comes the hard part.

I actually wrapped up the rough draft of the plot line around 55k words. It's full of passages that ramble and have little to do with the plot, have no significant tension, or drift off into heavily esoteric discussions of philosophy or quantum mechanics. While I might love them, the average person isn't going to want to read that. Now the editing begins.

A more realistic evaluation of the content after editing should put it as around 300 pages of 10pt text in a 4x6in trade paperback with normal margins. I'm working on the first comb-through edit, which should hopefully catch most of the typos, the clumsy sentences, and the incorrect homonyms that snuck in under the influence of sleep deprivation, alcohol and coffee; with luck I'll identify most of the obvious plot holes and the points at which credibility is stretched too far, and begin formulating ways to correct them. I can develop subplots, establish more character sympathy, weed out some clichés and insert better foreshadowing. Then I can set the whole thing aside for a while to let it cool off, and read it with a fresh eye later for the second pass.

In the mean time I'll be spending some family time and hopefully finishing the remodeling that got put on hold for NaNo. In January I'll be saying goodbye to some beloved hobbies and getting into the grind of writing daily, with the mindset that it's a second job that I enjoy. :)

I have a ton of other stories that need to be set to paper. I've been developing a universe for years, and I'm ready to share. That should be easier, since this story for NaNoWriMo was purely contrived on short notice just for this exercise.

Wish us luck. ;oD