I'm glad I don't have to go to work tomorrow, although the prospect of a three-day weekend is somewhat less awe-inspiring given that in nine days, I will be out of work for six months. Today, I woke up late, read part of a romance novel in bed until around 1pm, and then showered, slathered on some makeup, and had a late brunch at Mike's Cafe. It's a good thing I always want the same thing - the waitress had already put in my order (breakfast casserole, no spinach) before asking me what I wanted, and she also came to my table bearing an iced tea. The interesting thing is that even though I always order the same thing, they're remarkably inconsistent, and so it tastes different every time - it's a combination of potatoes, black beans, red peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese, and sour cream, but the proportions vary wildly every weekend. Today it was heavy on tomatoes, which is my least favorite variation, but it was still delicious.
After Mike's, I determined that the next step in writing my romance novel is to revisit what I have and make an effort to rewrite it and include some stuff that I've been thinking about for awhile but that was not led into from the very beginning. To rewrite, I felt that it was important to have a paper copy, and so I was going to go to Kinko's to accomplish this. I looked into ordering it online for in-store pickup - the website said it would cost ~$20 to send a 230-pg document to my nearest Kinko's but that it might take them ten hours to process it. I decided that I could just as easily go there and do it myself at one of the printing kiosks. However, when I got there, I learned that they would charge me 49 cents/page to print one-sided black-and-white pages, which meant that my rough draft would cost ~$115. I just can't understand how that possibly makes sense - if I printed it myself, it would take no effort from anyone in their store, whereas if I sent the order to them, they would at least have to collect it and deal with me when I arrived. Charging me 5x more to print the thing myself seemed absurd. So, I bought a ream of paper at Office Max and went into the office to print, and then I spent this evening rereading the entire draft.
On the first read-through, I mostly corrected for punctuation, word choice, etc., but now that I have a better sense of what the novel looks like so far, I'm ready to begin editing. The main problems, so far as I can see them, are that I'm too wordy (as any casual reader of my blog would guess), that my sentences are too long (as evidenced by every post I've written), and so my 'voice' isn't punchy enough. Also, I haven't spent enough time on Amelia's thoughts/background - while Malcolm seems to leap from the page, Amelia is kind of boring, and I need to spice her up and talk more about her internal workings so that she is just as appealing as Malcolm is. However, that's a problem for another day - I really need to go to bed. Goodnight!
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