Camp Nano Week One

Daily results were mixed this week, from finding twenty minutes to write at a downtown Starbucks before a doctor's appointment, to finding two and a half hours while the baby napped when the dishes were under control.  I'm still chugging along, still feeling good about my edits, I'm not so far behind my goal that I couldn't reasonably catch up, and I managed to keep my house from burning down and my son from climbing out a window on a week when my husband was desperately ill and I had a boatload of doctor's appointments for self-care things I've been neglecting, like the eye doctor and the dentist.  I call that a win.

Even more of a win is that I finished Phase Two of my edits on the Firebird story.  In this round of edits, there are four phases.  The first was line edits and fixing typos.  The second was massaging the language, smoothing out awkwardness and fixing instances where the word I used was not quite right.  This was where I worked on cadence and scanning.  This was where I had whole paragraphs blocked off in orange highlighter with the word "gross" written in the margin.  This is the one that cleaned up most of the sludge that resulted from blazing through the first draft during National Novel Month while I had a napping baby strapped to my chest.  It was a time consuming edit, but the story is so much better.  I can read it now without wanting to gorge out my own eyes.

The next two phases in this edit are the edits marked in lime green (the sections that need research and the sections that need specificity) and the edits marked in pink (global edits).  I'm going to tackle these simultaneously, since some of the research requires waiting for books to come in at the library and the fact that I don't want to hold myself to just doing research for however long that takes.  Doing these two phases at the same time will also help because the global edits are going to be head scratchers and it'll be nice to build a break from that (or some thinking time) into my schedule.  Global edits include, but are not limited to: smoothing the passage of time, handling flashbacks, focusing more on certain characters, upping the romance, and solidifying the themes that have risen up after the first draft.

Good luck to everyone else doing Camp NaNo!  Keep at it.