Recap

So I am home again, jiggidy-jig – back to my mum’s, back to being the oldest teenager in town. But the month-long house and cat-sitting break has done me the world of good, and I am feeling a lot more optimistic about life than I did back at the start of this year.

Oh do I miss having a proper desk for my computer though! One day I shall have a desk with an actual chair, rather than having to work cross-legged sitting on my bed. It’s a good thing I pay lip service to yoga occasionally. Maybe along with the Tree there is a position called the Uncomfortable Writer. If so then I am a master at that particular pose.

The redrafting has continued at a cracking pace during my time in pleasant exile. I managed to de-tangle and rewrite four chapters, which means I am now writing this from the lofty height of chapter sixteen. Six left to go, folks! I am hoping that I will be able to amalgamate a couple of those as well. It would be so nice for this book to come in at twenty chapters. Still, I will have to wait and see what best suits the story.

One thing that is fab with redrafting is that I can really see how much my writing has improved, and feel I am a better writer now than I was when first spilling words onto the pages to create this book. I guess it is a gradual awareness of my writing style, and knowing what bad old habits I slip into occasionally (like pulling on a slobby tracksuit with threadbare elbows, last fashionable in the early nineties). Top of the bad habits list is a tendency to wallow in the past tense, so these scenes have involved lengthy rewrites to bring the action into the present. But on the whole I think I am still on schedule to finish by March... maybe mid-March though, as suddenly that seems very close!

Current Stats table:


Compared to when that table was a scary purple wilderness, the current stats table is making me very happy indeed. I have coloured the last few chapters in red so I'll get a real sense of finishing when I get to that stage, that is if I am not a gibbering wreck by that time!

Read more about my redrafting process here.