mugenmine | “I’m missing something.” (Reply)

Stuck
Draft 3
Chapter 1 @ 1555

Finally! I'm getting there! I've hit the editing sweet spot. I've been waiting forever for this! For me the best part of writing is after a few rounds of edits and the story is pretty nailed down(ish) and you get to start looking at things on a line level and focus on word choice and the fun stuff.

I'm attempting a kind of a hybrid version of this. I'm still doing quite a bit of rewrites, while also massaging the text. I'm hoping to combine draft 3 and 4 in a way. This round will probably take a bit longer, as I'm doing two large steps at once, but I think this might work better then doing two rounds. I've gotten it to the point where I can start to read it out loud as I edit, as it's finally useful. The goal is that when I get out of this MEGADRAFT I'll be close to beta time.

I am most definitely putting cart before horse with the above paragraph, as I'm only on chapter 1 of this beast, and in a week or two I'll most likely be weeping and walking into walls, but at least now when I'm done with a page I'm like, well this might be okay.

So I've hit kind of a dilemma. For me, editing takes brainpower and focus, and lately at the end of the day I don't have the energy for line editing and writing 500 words so I just write the 500 words to get my count in. The other day I was thinking, this regimen is in a way slowing down the editing process, while speeding up the creation process, but also slowing the finishing process. Before I would work on one thing, edit that thing and then post the thing. Now I write on all the things to hit my quota, edit one thing when I have brain power and now have like 8 running WIPs in play.

There is the possibility that if I just focused on one thing I might be finished by now, but then I wouldn't be hitting my daily quota, and I'm not quite ready to give that up (I'm at 99 days!). So it's a toss up. I imagine it will balance itself out. I mean I'll most likely have the first draft of one or two things done by the time I finally finish this story... (This is really just me talking to myself in circles. Processing my process.)

But for now the main focus is back on the edit.

Today I realized that I started posting Switch on 3/24/13 and finished it on 4/21/13. So it's been over a year now! Maybe that's what is freaking me out.

Ah well, plowing ahead. Each page edited is a page closer to putting this thing to bed. I've done three! I kind of like the three.