This is the first day of the Week of Buckling Down and Doing the Work - the one where I gird my loins and sweat over the edits to my second book. It's the week where I do the work before I get on to the Internet to check mail, blog, browse and basically get happily lost in the catacombs of my cybercave. Yeah!
Well. I've noticed that whenever I make this kind of decision, evil cackling imps conspire to throw obstacles in my way, just for the hell of it. This morning my mother asked me to go with her to a town about 30 miles away to look at new doors for her kitchen cabinets. How could I refuse? She asks little of me. So we trotted over to El Socorro, checked out the doors, chose a colour (satin white), and left with a handful of brochures. By then it was midday, so I took her to a little hole-in-the-wall place with the best Indian delicacies in the area, and we parked and had those for lunch.
When we took off again I thought we were returning home, but I should have known. She turned in the opposite direction and I resigned myself. There's a large garden store in that area, and just as I suspected, my mother pulled up in front of it. The maniacal gleam that gets in her eyes whenever she's around green, growing things was on high beam. Once she gets into one of those places time stops, so I paced the aisles between the arborvitae, junipers and frangipani while she rooted through row after row of herb seedlings, shrubs and annuals. I like plants myself, so it was not a chore. Except for the sweltering heat.
When we finally left she was clutching (of course) a little thing with purple inflorescences that she called queen of flowers. We got home around 2.30.
I have to admit that I peeped. I booted the computer and checked the mail and the blog.
Then I settled down to work on book 2. Binned chapter 2 and immediately felt better. All that back story was just slowing the thing, and I decided to chop it up and spoon the info in small bites in other places. Worked for several hours on that. Beginning to feel much better about the book.
Tomorrow I'll print out the outline and shift stuff around to get the story moving faster, then decide where I'll introduce the other changes that I'm contemplating.
Actually looking forward to getting back into it. I hope those imps are getting the message that (to mix metaphors) they can throw curveballs at me, but they won't derail me.
Ha.
2 comments:
Ah yes, welcome to the editing cave. You know you gotta get in there sometime, but it's lonely, it's monotonous and there's nothing much on those familiar walls to distract you. You yearn for the slightest opportunity to skip out into the sunshine.
Can you tell I'm supposed to be editing as well? :) You're my current distraction, Liane!
Oh, no, kaz... you don't need more of those!
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