It's only a bit past midnight, but I think I need to go to bed. While progress on the manuscript has been mostly exhilarating today (with the exception of the two hours I lost somewhere on Wikipedia), it's an exhausting process -- I'm having to keep track of the macro edits necessary to make a 400-page story flow nicely, develop conflict appropriately, etc., while also noting the micro edits I will need to make to grammar, spelling, word choice, timing issues, and the like.
The result is that my printed copy of the manuscript now has notes in five different ink colors, with post-it tabs in three different colors jutting out from the top to tell me where to add/remove/substantially rewrite scenes. The light blue notes are what occurred to me last night as I was reading; the dark blue notes are transcribed from the comments I had made to myself in Scrivener (my writing software) and didn't choose to print on the manuscript earlier; the orange notes are what the beta readers thought of the first half; the green notes are plans to develop Ferguson's character; and the purple notes are changes I need to make to Madeleine. I suppose this doesn't count the shocking-pink to-do list written on the back of the last page, but that color won't go into the manuscript proper until my next pass (the forces working against Madeleine and Ferguson to keep them apart). And I still have to add red (the sexytimes pass to make sure they're having sex at the right times/in the right quantities/qualities, and that there's reasonable tension between them when sexytimes aren't happening). You really wanted to know that, right?
So anyway, the good news is that I think I finally have a handle on the dark, hidden heart of the issues each of them are resolving in this book. You'd think I would have figured that out, say, six months ago, but better late than never. It doesn't change much, but it will help to make their conflict more believable -- after all, he doesn't want to be a duke, and she doesn't want to be a duchess, and it's pretty hard to believe that given that I would likely agree to sacrifice at least one of my siblings (sorry, siblings) if I could be a duchess at the end of it (as long as the duchess was duchess of someplace cool, like Aquitaine or Sussex, and not, say, the duchess of Novosibirsk). And, my musings tonight revealed the reasons why their desire to avoid that kind of power/title might make sense.
Okay, I'm done talking about the book -- this isn't v. interesting to any of you, unless you read the first half as one of my beta readers (in which case you would rather have me writing the book instead of this blog so that you can finally read the ending). Suffice it to say that the editing is going well, and I think I'm going to emerge from this weekend with my sanity mostly intact.
Hopefully everything else emerges intact too; it's supposed to drop into the 20s in Palo Alto this weekend, which is unheard of. I almost wish I had chosen a different weekend to leave, since I may miss a v. rare snowfall in Palo Alto, but I'm committed to Monterey until Sunday morning. I also hope that nothing untoward happens with my house; I turned the heat down to 45, but luckily I didn't turn it off, so hopefully the pipes don't freeze. The very fact that I even thought about the risk of my pipes freezing feels absurd; I don't think it's dropped below freezing in the decade that I've lived out here, so this is all v. strange and bizarre.
And on that note, I should go to bed. I did walk around when I woke up (not an accomplishment, since I didn't get out of bed until after 11), and I made it down to the wharf, where I had a bowl of delicious cioppino (probably not Alyssa-approved, but steamed seafood with a tomato broth is closer to approved than the fried clams that I wanted instead) while looking out over the water. I also spent a couple of hours in the lobby of the hotel having dinner, where I brainstormed by the fire while eating and watching the solitary waitress dealing with an unexpected onslaught of diners. But if I can get up earlier tomorrow, I think I'll go have breakfast in a different neighborhood and perhaps check out a knitting store before buckling down to the writing -- wish me luck!
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