I haven't rambled about the manuscript for awhile. Here's an update on where things are, if anyone is curious.
It's summer vacation in these parts, which means back to grinding over the word processor. Vacation didn't start well this year, which actually isn't too uncommon for me: I don't always adjust well when going from letting my school life become all-consuming to waking up one morning and finding out that once again I'm back to being like the jet-fuel genius Tommy Shaw sang about in "Too Much Time on My Hands." Some years this existential whiplash really knocks me over and leaves me feeling depressed and aimless until I regain my footing. And since this past spring was one of the more consuming springs I've had in recent memory (to say the very, very least), I slipped into summer vacation as smoothly as a car speeding down the highway might slip into a concrete bridge support. So that first week off? Not pretty.
But! I'm over that ridiculous hump now and I'm biting off huge chunks of my summer to-do list with each passing day. Of course the biggest bullet point on that list is finishing off the manuscript once and for all, and man, I am so close to done right now I can almost taste it. Of course DONE is relative, but reaching this version of done will be big. I've just recently finished attacking a printed copy with a pencil and a highlighter, which was one of the last big steps I needed. Looking at the story on paper gives me a much different perspective than on the computer screen since I can't just scan my way through it as easily and carelessly. Also, since I can't edit on the fly I have to scribble down notes and take a little more time to think about what it is I'm going for. And now that step is finished, so all I have left is turning all of those scribbled notes into edits and revisions. After that I just have a few more very specific beta readers waiting to look it over, including one officer of the Grammar Police who will be giving it a merciless edit. Then I'll be ready to send it into the publishing world to seek its fortune, so to speak. And since I'm really only about a month behind the admittedly ambitious timeline I'd established last fall, I'm feeling pretty happy about being where I am.
So why am I pulling away from it for a few self-indulgent blog paragraphs? Am I procrastinating here, or is this really part of the process for me? God knows my process contains more than a small amount of attention deficiency, so even when I'm waist-deep in it doing what I know works for me it still feels like procrastinating... until I reach the point when surprise, surprise! Things have somehow managed to come together. Seriously, this stage is so sadly meticulous it's like taking ten minutes to write out notes on what I want two consecutive sentences to say, and then walking away from it to let my brain cook in a whole different direction for awhile before I'm ready to take those notes and build those two sentences exactly the way I want them.
Which is exactly why I'm writing this now: I'm letting two specific troublesome sentences percolate a bit, and sometimes thinking about the whole thing sideways like this is what I need to get past the roadblock. And now that I have a few unnecessary paragraphs out of my system, maybe something will be waiting for me when I go back to that file. Time to go find out.
...and for the record, anyone who isn't listening to Rush's new album "Clockwork Angels" these days is really missing out... just saying....
