Got back the first of the reader-edits for tDW from my buddy Patrick yesterday.
He pointed out some typos (oh! It’s soooo nice to be at the stage of this novel where I’m like, “Hey, yea, check for typos, because I don’t intend on trashing this whole book and starting again!”), pacing issues, one rather irritating “but if it’s an egalitarian society, and you could only really know who the *mother* of any one kid is, wouldn’t the line of succession be through the mother, and wouldn’t that hose up this whole problem with the bastard?” bigger sort of issue that I do need to deal with (that’s the problem with having written the first half of the first draft of this book when I was 19. You end up with a lot of silly assumptions that end up being important to the plot, but don’t really jive with the new society you came up with at 23/25).
The summation of the critique, however, amounted to: “Take this book and SELL IT.”
For some reason I had one of those nights last night where I got home and just wanted to feel sorry for myself, but I sucked it up and input some of the edits into the first few chapters of tDW and started on the revisions of the last few chapters I wrote of God’s War, which I completed just before the coma. It’s a little weird to look back at those chapters because they’ve got some oddly put-together sentences and very little setting and description of any sort (and what’s there is… weirdly worded). Instead, it’s full of choppy action scenes involving pistols, whips, blowing up a woman’s head, kidnapping, and finding a guy’s head in a box.
I’m keeping all of those events, of course (how could I not???), but giving them some setting/padding (yes, sometimes you *need* some padding) and cleaning up the weird sentences.
So, my to-do list for the weekend:
1) finish contract writing passage (I have no idea why this is taking me so long. Denial. Fake writer’s block. A need to not pound through it as slap-dash as I did the last one [which I completed with blurry vision and a sugar headache]. I’ll push through it this weekend)
2) finish inputting Patrick’s edits into tDW
3) finish GW revisions and start on those last 75 pesky fucking pages
4) write thank-you note to Jenn’s parents
5) send in prescription claims to health insurance (had to make copies of my reciepts, which I’ve just finished here at work)
6) write out Strongly Worded Letter to said health insurance for their denial of my last half-day of hospital care. They argued that I was out of “immediate danger” by that time. I’m not sure how I would have a) known this in my sugar-dazed state b) been able to demand that the doctors release me in my sugar-dazed state c) would have been able to go home and give myself insulin shots when most of that day was spent going over how the hell I was going to care for myself post-hospital.
I FUCKING HATE insurance companies.
7) pay the most pertinent of the bills (ie the ones due before the 20th) with the paltry $650 paycheck I just received (oh, the joys of PTO that accrues at a snail’s pace of 5 hours per pay period, and no sick pay!).
8) finish reading “On Beauty.”
9) order books for as-yet-unnamed Genocide Novel research
10) spend today catching up on all the actual work at work I was supposed to be doing this week, but decided to spend writing emails instead….
