November 16 to 22

Days to deadline: 15

I'm in the final stages of "find and destroy" for overused words.  It takes me about forty minutes to do each pass through the manuscript.  And I've got about a dozen words to go through.  But, bonus, I can do it in the evening as well as the afternoon.

I spent a lot of time last week trying to decide whether or not to trim a particular scene from the manuscript.  It would have dropped my total count by 3400 words.  But in the end, I decided it was necessary to keep the sequence narratively, which meant I would have had to do some kind of flashback or "in the meantime" narration which would have dragged the story.  Thank you to CS for helping me to figure it out.

The extra words mean that my line edit will take 3 weeks instead of 2 and will cost more.  But it's a better story than it was, so I will accept that and try not to get too hung up on the numbers.

Now comes the business and promotion part.  I've got a friend, S.M. McEachern, who has offered to help.  Her book, Sunset Rising, has done really well.  It's a dystopian YA with romantic elements.  (I've read it and enjoyed it.)

Life has been getting chaotic which makes getting things done a little harder than I'd hoped.  But I'm still chugging through.  I will make this happen.