With my recent detour, you'd probably think I'd be too out of it to do anything with respect to writing. And you'd be right. I completely lost the months of March and April. Not that I can blame that on getting sick. Based on the rate I've been moving forward on the current work, I seriously doubt I would have done anything those two months anyway. Yeah, it's that bad.

Enter chemotherapy. Six hours in a chair getting strange fluids pumped into my body? What a perfect time to print out all those notes, pour through them, and see if there's anything salvageable. Unfortunately (?) chemo only comes once every three weeks.

Catching Up

I've spent most of this year in reboot mode on the novel with the working title of Winter's Gate. Stuck on the fifth draft, I'm still severely unhappy with the pace and depth of the book. The former needs to pick up greatly and the latter needs to go way deeper. Otherwise, no one but the people I force to read it will read it. Even I can't read it.

Part of the fix has been the aforementioned note re-reading exercise. I had to make sure I didn't come up with something Brilliant back in, say, September 2010 (spoiler alert: I didn't.) The rest has been rewriting the book at the synopsis level. As I'm fond of saying: if you can't write a good story in 500 words, you can't do it in 90,000 either. And it doesn't seem to matter how fond I am of saying that, I still tend to write 90,000 words before I know what I'm actually trying to accomplish.

So that's really all I have at this point. Still hoping to get a good, solid, real draft done by 12/21/2012. After that, I'm just playing it by ear.