Six Weeks To Go

One of my new years resolutions was to finish my novel this year. Not just this draft, but the whole enchilada.

Following the advice of Sage Cohen, author of The Productive Writer, who did me the honor of writing a guest post for me in January, I’ve broken my larger goal down in to smaller goals, and the first is to finish the second draft by my birthday.

I’ve got six weeks left.

I was making some good progress on the draft in February, but then the freelance work came my way, and I got busy working on the rewrite of my non-fiction proposal, and the novel got pushed to the side.

So damn, just six weeks. I guess the first thing to do is to assess how to spend them. I’m reluctant to pass the time polishing the language, because I expect that I may get some larger notes about the story when I do send it out for feedback. And why is that? There must be something I know is structurally not right if I’m assuming that’s the feedback I’ll get.

Whenever I find myself in this position I tend to fall back on rereading the whole thing, with an attempt at objectivity. It’s time consuming, but if I don’t make this draft as good as I can I’m just wasting the time of anyone kind enough to read it and give me feedback. I hate it when I read someone’s work and their response to my feedback is “yeah, I kind of knew that.” If you kind of know it’s not right, then fix it.

I guess I have to follow my own advice first and do the tough stuff.