What on earth has the woman been doing?

. . .mostly, I’ve been going through the manuscript of The Gathering Edge, fixing sentences, doing continuity checks, breaking long chapters into short chapters, moving a chapter up, sharpening dialogue, and layering in details.  At the moment, the word count stands at 36,777, with a net gain of about 2,000 words.

“Net gain” is of course a moving target.  Whole paragraphs have been removed from the playing board — and replaced with other paragraphs.  I have wantonly removed maybe 300 total words of an explanation that will be needed later, but happened not to be in the right place.  Maybe a couple thousand “new” words have been written, but there’s really no way to quantify that.  “Word count” as an indicator of progress is really only (sort of) useful in the active drafting phase; there’s no good indicator of progress being made in the revision/squaring-up phases of the work, except maybe, “Yes; that’s better!”

At the moment, the manuscript is in the form of one Largish Lump of narrative, following one set of characters, and several Smaller Lumps of narrative, following other characters.  These will have to be woven together at some point, but, at just over a third of a book, word-count-wise, we don’t have enough material to begin that particular process.

So! That’s what I’ve been doing.  I’m a little over half-way through revising/sharpening/squaring-up the Largish Lump.  Today, after I get through Various Mundane Chores, I’ll sit down with my red pen and the other half of the LL and get to work.

In other news, the GoFundMe project for replacing Larry Smith’s van (for those coming in late, ref here and here), is $5,292 short of the $30,000 goal.  If you can, please donate; if you can’t donate, you can still help by spreading the word.  Thanks so much.

Here’s a picture of Sprite in one of her favorite places, overlooking the Cat Garden.