Attempting to quantify the suckmonkey

[owlectomy]

The book comes in at 80,000 words so far, give or take. I've edited 1/3, which leaves ~53,000 words to edit. Let's say I have to rip out and rewrite 2/5 of that--I'm okay with Ruth, August, and Paul. It's Iris's plot arc that has me shaking my head and wanting to hit things. Of course, rewriting that major will throw the whole plot out of whack to some extent, but I think I can recover much more easily for those sections than for the sections that caused the problems in the first place.

That's 21,200 rewrite words.

That's actually not ALL that much once I can put my finger on the solution--ah, except there is no one solution. I'm just stabbing in the general direction of my intuitions, and it's only coming into focus very gradually. I'm not thinking things through enough during the day, so when I sit down to write I get a blank. And I don't think things through enough because I'm not writing consistently. I'm not writing consistently because when I sit down to write, I draw a blank. Hah. Nice trick, that.

I think it will be better if I just remind myself that the other 60,000 words are, all told, actually pretty decent.

Comments

[owldaughter.livejournal.com]

It is never, ever the decent words that comfort us. It's always the non-decent, sucky ones that stick int he mind obsessively.

Damn them.

(Still haven't read your paper - been, well, a bit busy, what with baby and book deadline. It's on my list of things to read once the MS has been handed in.)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

No worries. If I were as busy as you I'd have to make an effort to pencil in time for breathing.