And so it goes...

I'm just a little bit proud of the fact that I got through a first pass of The Lauras in 36 hours, which means that the resulting draft is shorter by about 17,000 words (or one word in six) and the notes that Jason sent me now look like this:

 I'm trying to be organised, Mom, I swear! 

Since the first pass was mainly about reducing the size of the book like a contestant on a medically questionable reality TV show, any note that couldn't be dealt with by making a straightforward cut got marked with a tab. And since I'm eternally trying to overcome my entropic nature, they're colour coded: green-yellow is for notes that need a second look, pink for timeline issues, blue for differences of opinion, and orange for those rare moments where I have no idea what the note is asking me to do.

There aren't that many tabs, all things considered, but cutting that much will have left narrative holes that need to be puttied in. I've also got notes from Lucy that I'm hoping will cover anything that my editor missed.

Juuuust a little more intimidating than all the coloured tabs.

And while I'm at it, there's my own self to satisfy. During the cutting portion I kept running across sentences that needed to be tightened up, which means that I'm probably far enough away from the thrill of having written the thing to be able to see it clearly. Which means it's time to go through and make sure that every single word is the exact perfect word and ruthlessly remove any that aren't.

So, with all that to do and limited time to do it in, it makes perfect sense that the moment I finished the first pass was the moment that my brain decided it was vacation time, as certain brains are wont to do. What have I been doing since I finished the first past? God alone knows, because I sure don't. When will my brain come back and start behaving? With any luck, the moment I click publish and go make another cup of coffee. But that's assuming I don't run into any half-read books on the way back.