The Writing Moment

A mental mistake. Revising today, the draft surprised me; things I thought I’d changed yesterday weren’t changed. WTH, over? Didn’t I change that? And that? Was that all a mirage, a dream, work done in a different reality.

Realization came belatedly, no, I was in the wrong draft. While working on the latest draft yesterday, I’d opened a previous draft to look something up. Well, it was the last doc closed yesterday, so it went to the top of the document list. Without thinking today, I opened it up, went to where the doc said I left off, and commenced revision. Wasn’t until I glanced at the page number and realized I was twenty pages behind that I finally seriously applied critical thinking to the moment and understood what happened.

What a rube. What a mistake. No harm; just time. But damn, I thought I did some good revising today. Hope I’ve learned a lesson and don’t do that again.

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Sunday’s Wandering Thoughts

He and his wife made some plans for cleaning, organizing, and purging. “Can we do this after you come back from your writing?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered with confidence. He had other plans as well. He could do it all, couldn’t he? Of course he could, right?

“That’s been taken under review,” his neurons replied. “We’ll see.”

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The Writing Moment

Deeply into revision after letting the novel in progress simmer for a few days. Surprising early cuts come, which weirdly feel ‘natural’. Like the book is already out there, and I’m shaping the manuscript to fit it.

The process is much more involved and slower than the creative writing stage. With the entire story from beginning to end filled in before me, I know how I want to sharpen its focus. Ten pages have been sliced away from the beginning. What remained of that bird required extensive rewriting. It’s like that first draft was an exploration of the history of an event and the characters populating it. Now that I’m familiar with it, I can properly tell the story. From less comes more.