Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: a Progress Post

I last reported on my progress on the eighth of this month, and it's nearing the end of the month now. "Reincarnation" currently has 125,244 words, and I'm not done. This book really got away from me; I'm going to have to trim a lot to make it manageable. I tweeted last week that this is the book that doesn't end (to which another friend supplied more of The Song That Doesn't End, with a literary bent. My friends get me, and that's awesome). I have four handwritten pages I need to type up, and, at the top of the fourth page is some notes I've already made of things I need to change and cut.

This is the downside to panstering, by the way. I may have to erase a whole month's writing, in the end, because I didn't hit my stride and get to the conflict until mid-February. There are some passages I can salvage for book 3 (this being a trilogy), but a lot of it will need to be scrapped entirely. And that's discouraging.

So discouraging, that I let myself get distracted into a read-through edit of book 1. The good news is, it's a compelling story. In two nights, I read through all of it, when I didn't think I'd have the time to do anything, writing-wise. My change of adding another perspective has threaded more tension in and added a subplot that keeps it ticking along. The bad news is, I have notes on things I need to change, and no time to fix them. I started out with just one page of handwritten pages I hadn't gotten to typing up, and it's ballooned since then.

Ah, well. The beat goes on, and I know where my time is going, at least. I'll figure out how to squeeze in everything I need to do, somehow.