I have ideas for blog posts.
I have brilliant thoughts to share with you.
I have illuminating commentary on the world at large.
I even have a brand new journal that is going to be devoted to ideas and information for this blog.
However, the journal has remained unopened, the ideas unprocessed, the thoughts simmering inside. I'm sure you can guess why. I'm still working on the novel. Slowly, slowly, as my mother used to say. And this final rewrite is coming way a bit more slowly than I had anticipated.
I tell myself this is a good thing, and here's why. At this late date (the eighth rewrite) everything in the novel is so intertwined that changing one teeny, tiny thing reverberates through it all. So moving Peter's dramatic scene from one chapter to the next means changing everything that led up to it and everything that follows.
And then, of course, there are the moments of panic. As in, I'm pretty sure I liked it better the way it was before. Those come about once a day every half hour or so, and that slows the whole process down. Also, when you spend your whole, entire day at your desk working, with only one wee break for acupuncture (during whence you snore loudly and with abandon), you need to take yourself some breaks in the form of checking email, every minute hour or so. It is a requirement of the job.
But, step by step we travel far, (which is another Mom saying if you hadn't guessed). And I have travelled almost to the end of this draft. Almost. Just a couple chapters away. Never mind that they are the most complicated ones to change.
I will be finished soon.
And then I shall return, refreshed, renewed and ready to write something, anything, other than my novel.
PS. Check it out--I've been added to the Top 100 Writing Blogs on The Daily Reviewer. Its that cute little badge to the right.
