Blog as Journal

This blog is going to move beyond its original purpose, which was to act as a kind of journal of the gestation of my work in progress, Redemption on the River (former working title:  Overboard).  Now I'm going to use it as my general write-about-what's-interesting to me build-it-and-they-will-come (maybe) blog, which will be focused mainly on books and writing, but will have plentiful dollops of other stuff thrown in.  We'll see how it goes.

So, what is the status of the (formerly) Secret Project?

First, the title is almost certainly finalized as Redemption on the River.  It's fairly short, rolls off the tongue reasonably well, and I believe it makes for a good four-word representation of the story.

Second,  I will almost certainly pursue electronic rather than traditional publishing.  There are many reasons for this, and I plan to discuss them in a future postt.

Third, I just completed incorporating the red-ink changes that resulted from three complete, beginning-to-end self-edits of version 10.0.  The changes are not significant to the story, but Chapter 2 is tightened up, some redundancies are gone, and a number of pesky adverbs no longer clutter things up.  The word count dropped from 156,408 to 154,867, a reduction of 1,541.

I have christened the new draft as version 10.3.  Although the changes make the book incrementally better, they are not really significant.  I have been through it so many times the words are starting to wear grooves in my brain.  I am going to do my best to leave it alone for a while, although it will be hard to wait until editor Laurie Rosin gets to it in November.

I'm Back

Holy smokes I had no idea that it had been this long since I'd paid attention to this blog. Several things led me to ignore it.

First, I realized that, based on feedback from beta readers, I realized that I had to do a MAJOR rewrite of the Overboard, including a 100% rewrite of the entire second half of the book. As my last post says, I couldn't decide what to do, and that led to my motivation deserting me for well over a year.

Second, last summer (2010) my motivation mysteriously reappeared stronger than ever. I realized that I needed to follow the story where it led rather than where I had planned it to go, and I sat down to write. I set a goal of completing the major rewrite in six months and I made it happen. Then the follow on rewrites started.

Third, I realized that I was spending far too much time reading blogs and websites rather than working on the novel, and this blog was part of the distraction. I made the decision to ignore the blog until I felt that the novel was finished or nearly so.

That time has come, the book is ever-so-nearly-done, and I need to start thinking about how to seek publication, should I decide that it's worthy to do so.

More on that and a lot more later.