in the midst of week five of the Write-a-thon, now with more irony

Okay, so at this point in the Write-a-thon I’m flagging.

I’ve gotten two of the three stories from last summer redrafted. Both can use another go, but that’ll be later. I’ve got work done on five chapters.

So, I’ve got one more story to redraft, and five chapters to work on.

I tackled the genocide-God-and-me story as the middle project, and that actually went surprisingly well. I do know that I’m going to want to revise it once more. It’s currently out to a few people for feedback. Yes, I’m hoping that someone will say something like, “You know that problem on page 16? Well, here’s a way how to fix it. Also, here’s what you need to do to make the throughline clearer…”

What?

Don’t tell me that you, as a writer, haven’t wished for all the infelicities in your work to just magically get fixed.

*sigh*

But still, I’ve gotten some critiques back, and they have been very helpful. No magic bullets, but frankly, that’s not actually what I expect. I mean, it might be nice…

This leaves my mannerpunk story about my coffinmaker. (And five more chapters. Why the hell did I say I wanted to work on ten new chapters? I mean, over the course of the entire summer, sure. But in six weeks?! What the hell was I thinking?)

It needs some problematizing, as well as some streamlining. I think it would help if I figured out the secondary protagonist’s motivations. Knowing things like that is usually a good idea.

Argh. Back to the salt mines.