Halfway Point

It's December 16! Halfway point of the month! Time to reassess goals! Recommit to the journey! And I'm... well, I'm behind, okay? Happy?

It's been a crazy few days (The Husband is home, but the saga continues), and I'm picking my way through a tricky passage. My heroine (let's give her a name, shall we?) Somi is recounting her four years spent in an antru (which is a cloister for women, but closer to a monastic medical school than a convent).  Important stuff happens during these years: she learns a great deal about many subjects; she first reads the book from which she's taken the quotations she uses to illustrate her life's lessons; she develops an intense, unhealthy, and plot-important friendship with another novice; and she undergoes a sexual awakening. So I'm trying to sum all that up on my way to the next scene that moves the story forward.

Anyway, put it all together and I'm at 6,481/15,000 words edited, and 2,195/3,000 for words cut. A little ahead of the game on cutting, but solidly behind on actual forward progress. The next two weeks are going to be crazy in husband-recuperating-from-major-surgery, four-year-old-on-break-from-nursery-school, Christmas-preparations-galore kinda way, but I'm going to try to keep working when I can and not freak out too much if I don't meet my goal this month.

Aaaand... because I'm an insane masochist in addition to being irredeemably lazy, which is like the most twisted curse ever... I'm adding another goal for this month. I need to rewrite the hero's dialogue in a key scene I've already edited. Lemme tell ya about the hero Bresher: when I first began working on this story, lo these many years ago, I had a clear image of who he should be. But then, as I developed Somi's character, I realized he was too much like her for their story to have the spark I wanted. So, rather late in the game, I axed that Bresher (but I've promised him his own book someday), and built a whole new one. I love him, of course, but I don't know him the way I know Somi. And sometimes it's hard for me to hear his voice.

But last night I had one of those magical flashes of insight you get while you're unloading the dishwasher and daydreaming about your novel, and now it's like a faulty line has been repaired and I can hear him perfectly. And I know now that a lot of the dialogue I've written for him is shit he would never say. This is the third draft; I have to go back and fix it now.

Um... and the changes I make to that scene may wind up changing the title from Twelve Names to Eleven Names, but we'll jump off that bridge when I get to the end of the draft and count names.

So, my goals for the remainder of the month:

1) Edit 15,000 words.
2) Cut 3,000 words from Act I.
3) Rewrite Bresher's dialogue in his first meeting with Somi

My goal for the evening:

Edit 500 words.