Monday 22nd March 2021

Today, I did a bunch of editing on 4S.  I really want to get this done but I also want to get some outlines done as well.

I made good progress with this book today.  It seems really solid and the only worry I really have about it is repetition.

The main character’s best friend is a bit of an arsehole and constantly puts the main character down.  When our hero finds a new set of friends who are not like this, he comments about it… a lot.

Part of that is the character.  They’re making a change in their life and as such it’s a slow realisation that not everyone is like this.  He’s even slow to enact change.  But I do worry, he mentions this a lot.

So this draft involves a lot of cutting, but whilst I’m doing it at a chapter level, I’m not sure if there needs to be a second cull looking at the overall story.

That’s going to be difficult to do because it literally means shutting myself away for a couple of days, starting early and finishing late, so that the entire novel stays in my head as I edit.

But I got a bunch of chapters done today, and I’m happy with a lot of the aspects of this story.  Sure it needs tightening, and that’s what I’m doing now.  But the characters are great and it’s a real fun book.

I want to get the current edit done this week if I can.  But I also want to get some outlines done as well.  I’ve had some ideas on those so I’ll return to them at some point.  Having the editing work makes for a good palette cleanser so I can come and look at them afresh.

I suspect that I need to spend some time where instead of letting the pieces fall into place, I make more of a concerted effort to move it along.  Knowing when to push and when to let things sort themselves out in my back brain is a skill I’m still mastering.  But if nothing else it makes a break from editing chapters.

So in short, today was spent focused on editing and I did a bunch of chapters.  It’s going well but there’s other stuff I need to do as well as this.

Whilst the days when there’s not much to say because I’ve been working on one thing are a bit annoying from the perspective of The Climb  (they don’t make for good episodes), they are days that are needed because they get the work done.  I need another couple of novels in the pipeline, and thankfully, things were already in progress, but the schedule does need to change around a bit now.

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