Progress Post: Stalled

It's been a while since my last progress post (and why do I think there should be a priest listening to me narrate this post, and assigning me a word count?). Sadly, I have very little to report since my April 23rd post. I still haven't finished "Reincarnation." I won't have it finished by the next writing group meeting, as I said I would. I've been poking at it, but it's not done, nor is it close to done.

What I have accomplished is driving to Tennessee and back, arriving in the wee hours on each leg. (There is no good time of day to start a 16-hour drive if you're not stopping in the middle, by the way.) I was there for my little sister's graduation, where she introduced me to her professors as the grammar prescriptivist, and the reason why she thinks she can't write.

It's good to know one had an impact on a young life, isn't it?

Seriously, though, it's difficult to write when you're driving, and just as much so when you're exhausted from the drive. The exhaustion also lowered my defenses so that, despite my overloading on vitamin C, I caught some kind of Tennessee death plague. It flattened me for nearly a week after my return. I couldn't eat, and could barely move, for three of those days.

That brings us up to last Sunday. I'd been working on my paid editing work whenever I wasn't lying about moaning that I was dying, and so I got to step up my editing work and see all the things I missed in my delirium. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough that I'm never going to discount the importance of alertness when editing ever again.

I did get around to the edits on "Awaken," the first book in the trilogy. I pondered the ending at length, and finally decided the problem was all the rambling. So I lopped it off and left some more questions open for book 2. Not that they're pressing questions, or anything, which is why I don't feel so much as a smidgen of guilt.

I posted the resulting draft to the writing group, not for critique, but so they can crit book 2 without having book 1 spoiled. If they don't care, they don't need to read it. Mostly, I'm hoping to hear that I'm crazy if I don't send my nice, polished manuscript to a publisher and/or agent, but I have no idea what kind of reception it'll actually get.