Uh oh

So once again, I’ve made a lot of BACKWARDS progress on Truth About T.M.S.…I’ve cut I don’t know how much, and added a good 15 brand new pages to earlier sections of the book over the last two days (and I’m finally getting close to where I left off so I can start making FORWARD progress again), but now I’m starting to get nervous that I’ve added too much…that maybe I’ve slowed things down or maybe I’m taking too long to get to the next plot point. I don’t know…I’m afraid I’m going to have to start at the beginning one more time and read straight through to where I’m at now before I’ll know for sure (which I’m going to do in about three minutes).

A certain editor may want to actually SEE what I’ve got on this book in the next day or two. If it reads okay, that won’t be a problem…other than I wish I had 100 pages to show her. As it is, I think I’m only going to have 70-75 pages (and the last 3-4 won’t count because those pages are sections that I wanted to get down while they were fresh in my mind, even though I still need to write some stuff leading up to those sections…so I’ve really only got 67-72 pages).

This is going to be a shorter book than the last couple I’ve written, which makes me happy. I think it’s only going to be about 120-125 pages. (Though actually, I’ve switched from Courier New to Times New Roman…so maybe it really isn’t any shorter???) Once I move on to this next plot point, I’ll be heading into the climax and the last 25% of the book.

I am definitely getting ready for some feedback on this project…a lot of people have seen the first 20 pages (well, the pages that were the first 20 LAST SUMMER!), but no one has seen the last 50 (except for Preteen who reads over my shoulder until I shoo him away). I go back and forth between thinking “this is going to be the best book I’ve done so far” to “what the heck am I doing???” For better or worse, I’m going to turn in whatever I have in early January to one of my writing groups (we only meet once a month, so if I want them to critique any of it before I turn it in, I think it’ll have to be in January)…I won’t have the whole thing yet, but if I can have up to the climax, that would be good.

Like I said yesterday, this particular book is going slower for me than most…and it’s not because I got a later start on it than I had hoped to (I kept taking additional freelance work whenever it was offered, thinking that whenever the contract for T.M.S. came, I’d just push the deadline out a little…but then I realized there would always be another freelance job and I’d NEVER get T.M.S. written if I wasn’t careful!)…this is a slower project. Not necessarily harder…and absolutely no less fun…I LOVE doing a book like this…it’s just taking me longer to do it. It’s got to be RIGHT, you know?