by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I continue to get positive feedback from people who have read the first scene of the novel.
And after way too much tinkering on my part, I’ve finally managed to cobble together a stable first three chapters. Now, I have to go through an edit what I’ve written so it’s not embarrassingly bad. What I usually do at this point is go see my dad in the nursing home and read over what I’ve written.
This is both good and bad. It’s good because I force myself to clear up problems sooner rather than later. It’s bad because inevitably I find myself in a situation where I want to change everything. Hopefully this won’t happen again this time. Hopefully I can edit these first three chapters without wanting to totally rewrite everything and change the order of everything as well.
But, we’ll see.
Editing my copy before moving forward in the novel has really helped make the overall text much, much better. But it also sometimes causes me to feel rather burnt out. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels.
Hopefully it won’t happen this time. Things have — finally — stabilized to the point that I think I should be able to sprint pretty quick through the rest of the novel. And, yet, so much could go wrong. My teeth continue to give me problems. (This sucks so bad.) And there a number of known unknowns that could slow me down a great deal if they don’t break my way.
I’m very grateful for the rather idyllic writing situation I’ve been in the last few years. If things change, then, well, that was inevitable. But I’ve progressed far enough in the process of writing this novel that I will press forward, even if the context is different.
