I’ve split my time today between doing lots of laundry and working on the novel revisions. I’m happy to announce that almost all the laundry is done (one load to fold, one to dry and fold, then towels to do tomorrow) and that I can consider myself solidly finished with revisions on 21% of the novel.

I reached one of the scenes I skipped writing out in May in favor of covering the full story arc, so I’ll have to write that tomorrow, and then I’ll be moving into material I first wrote a year and a half ago. Once I get that one scene written, I’ll be finished with the prologue and the first 8 chapters. Not too bad for a week’s work, eh?

Also worth noting, I took care of several large-scale issues in my revisions notes – things like fixing an italics discrepancy with a few words throughout the whole manuscript. I think I caught all of them, but we’ll have to see.

I hope your Monday was as productive as mine.

It’s been a quiet week, if you start marking the week after my travel home from Seton Hill. I got good work done on the manuscript on Tuesday and Wednesday, spent a rather productive day on Thursday at the job that pays me, and gave myself most of Friday and Saturday off, in part because I got enough work done on the manuscript to justify a few lighter days, and in part because I’ve been very disciplined about not just plowing through my ‘books for fun’ pile, and I needed a bit of a break.

Also, I tidied up around the house before Matt came home last night. We bought pizza from our favorite NY-style place and took it back to the apartment, rented a movie, and generally spent the night relaxing and catching up on everything we did in the last two weeks. Strange how even that relatively small amount of time seems so much longer when you’re used to catching up every day. I’m really glad it won’t happen again for a long time – the combo of Matt not having cell reception up at the youth camps and me being in a different time zone with a wacky schedule of activities just made it almost impossible to stay in touch.

At any rate, other than taking care of sending some emails I’ve been delinquent about, I’ve relaxed for most of today, too. My day-of-the-week radar is all thrown off – it seems strange that tomorrow is Sunday, but it is, and I have to remember to be at church on time to do everything that needs doing. Then it’ll be back to the manuscript for most of next week.

And since I haven’t been very interesting lately, have a look-see at the short sword I’d like (it’s on sale!) and, for those who are interested in the monetary side of the publishing business, I direct you to Jeaniene Frost’s excellent blog entry on the subject from last week.

I’ll try to do better this week on keeping the updates more updatey and less apologetic about not updating.

And, as a tangible way of marking my manuscript-revision progress, I’ve gone through 17% of the manuscript thus far, based on word count. It won’t all go this quickly, since I haven’t gotten to the middle bits that will need heavy revision and, in places, wholesale rewriting to fit my more mature understanding of how the novel works, but at least I’m working quickly through the new opening so I can get to the stuff that does need more work. On some levels it seems insane, but on others this whole revising the whole thing in a month deal isn’t all that bad. I’ll let you know if I’ve changed my mind by next week.

I appear to not be dead yet.

‘Yet’ is the key word there.

But I have groceries, I picked up the dog, I took a nap (you all know I love me some naps) and I’ve consolidated and updated my to-do list for the manuscript revisions I agreed to finish by the end of this month.

I’ll eat some dinner and return to start on the first set of pages. I have to revise 20 pages a day to be sure I finish on time. That means I have to act like a Real Writer this month. It should be good for me.

Also, I might be dead come August. But life is about sacrifices, isn’t it? So I’ll take one for the team.