Manuscript Progress

Me oh my. It looks like quite a bit of time has passed since I posted an update!

Well, there's a reason for that. I've been working on the manuscript.

My last post had me halfway through the first draft with editing with a few chapters sent to a friend to read. I have mixed news on that front; the friend never asked for more pages to read. But she's busy and there wasn't really any expectation for her to have time to read it, so I'm not upset.

This post finds me nearly finished with the first pass of the manuscript. The first draft had 112,240 words; at the moment it has 96,958 words, and I'm making steady progress to the end. OpenOffice tells me that I'm on page 366 of 402, and as I cut words the page count goes down (duh) so the end is a moving target. This does mean that I have less than 40 pages to go before hitting "the end" again!

The important thing is that I fit some time in every day to review and cut. I may not be making huge leaps and bounds every day, but I do try to get at least a third of a page reviewed. I squeeze it in whenever I have some time; before bed, after work, half an hour to an hour over the weekend days. And every paragraph I review is one more paragraph down, one more paragraph closer to being able to sit down and work on another story!

Soon I hope to be able to sit down and start compiling a list of things needed to try shopping it around. I can't say I'm confident that it will find representation, but I do feel it's getting near a point where I need to try. If I wait too long or keep polishing polishing polishing, I'll never get around to trying to sell it, and never slapping a "good enough" label on it to shop it around is about as good as not writing it at all.

Small Edit: The online friend I was referring to above emailed me to ask me not to read into her not asking for more of the manuscript to read; I replied to her (and hope that it's not stuck in her spam filter! Hopefully she'll see this edit and know to look for it!) to let her know that I was just putting that note in the blog entry just to follow up on the previous entry I had. I am in no way offended! I should do an entry on my philosophy of paying dues in trying to get published as an author.

To be honest, I've been neglecting the blog in large part because I've been spending more spare time playing with the manuscript and life activities; the blog would look very boring if I just kept entering counts every day so I was waiting to reach more of a milestone to report. However, I noticed that quite a bit of time had passed since my last entry and while I was chipping away at the manuscript and making progress, it was taking a lot of time to reach that milestone. So I put this entry in.

I fully understand that my friend has been busy; she's had a lot on her plate, and that's just with the things I knew were going on in her life! So I am in no way offended or reading into her not asking for follow up pages. I just wanted her to know that and I in no way intended for her to be hurt or offended by the quick mention in the blog entry here! (Believe me...if I were, I'd say so. I have a tendency to be...blunt?...with my thoughts. The closest I get to subtlety is masking names in the blog entries because I want to maintain some semblance of anonymity in my activities and privacy of others being discussed.)