Because all hands were on deck Saturday for Parent’s Weekend, attendance at school Monday was optional. Which meant seven hours of work on the novel today. Even managed a workout and a chiropractor visit. Nice. Consecutive days off are good. Forgot what they felt like.

Towards that end, about fifteen pages require a complete scrub down and another fifty need light revisions. The last five will be heavily modified. This is a good and solid draft, and very different from what the Eight read. Because of their input, and Team Eagle Eye, the manuscript is very different. Much better, too. While there may be more work to do—some say the revision process never ends—if nothing else the story moves forward constantly. And the filler level? I’ve got a huge file in Notepad containing extraneous scenes and snippets I cut. I killed lots of darlings. Yes, they are dead. All of them.

Speaking of cut lines, here is my favorite:

Emptiness. A void the night could not fill.


I have no idea why I savored that one so, but I did. Anyway, the emptiness passed.

Four readers are lined up and primed.

The wrap date is the weekend of October 22nd. I budgeted seven days for three start to finish read-throughs and revisions. Unless there is a mail service issue, the crew will have their copies by November 2nd. Since my poor scheduling damns the bulk of their task to the wrong side of the holidays—learned nothing from last year’s lesson apparently—likely only only two will finish by Christmas. Honestly, I have no expectation that anyone will punch out in less than ten weeks. And that’s OK. I have a certification exam to study for and a longish story in progress. There’s feedback on the Stash to implement as well. Plus I plan to enter a script in the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship in 2007, and I’ve been kicking ideas about for that. Have the urge to write a lot of dialog, I guess.

I see a good year on the horizon.