It’s been… a month.

I was sick for three weeks of April with allergies turned sinus infection with a dash of migraines and weather-induced joint pain, so I didn’t really get much done in those three weeks (or this first week of May for that matter). However, I did work pretty diligently in the first half of the month, so it’s not all bad. I managed to finish up edits up through Chapter 10 on my rewrite, which then became Chapter 9 once I condensed another two chapters into one earlier in the book. I started working on my next section of chapters, summarizing each scene so the writing part would be less difficult. Of course, that’s about the time when I got really sick, and my productivity tanked. Still, not all bad.

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Word Counts:

Blog/Newsletter: 1,128
BLOOD OF SALT, TEARS OF PEARL: 18,487

Total Words Written Last Month: 19,615
Total Words Written in 2022: 65,446

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Plans for This Month:

I’m finally starting to feel better, and after a bit of illness-induced frustration and malaise that made me want to quit writing altogether, I’m feeling better about going back to work on rewrites next week. However, moving forward, I’m going to revise my rewrite plan.

I figured out how to fix my weaker scenes and characterization in one of the early chapters of the book, so I think that’s going to be my first order of business this month. It’s just a matter of rewriting one scene (using some existing material from later in the book) and expanding another scene to include some of the original elements from the first draft that should help flesh out a minor subplot that becomes more important later in the book.

I also decided to rearrange my draft back into four parts at the natural act breaks and midpoint, instead of just lumps of five chapters. I think it will help me focus on the storytelling within each act as a whole, so that each act is cohesive in itself. At the moment, I have Act I: Chapters 1-6; Act IIa: Chapters 7-11; Act IIb: Chapters 12-17; Act III: Chapters 18-23, plus an epilogue. With the edits I plan on making to the current Chapter 3, that may expand into an extra chapter in the first act, but it really depends how much I actually need to add in there. (It’s already pushing toward 6,000 words, and I’m trying to keep my chapters less than 6,500 if at all possible.)

Once I’ve fixed those early scenes though, I’ll get back to work on the current Chapter 10, the next to last chapter in Act IIa. I’m hopeful that I can be pretty productive for the rest of the month (assuming I don’t get sick again), and I can wrap up Act IIa before June rolls around.

I’m definitely behind where I would like to be progress-wise, but such is life.