Okay.

Closing down gmail.

Closing down LiveJournal.

Closing down the NaNoEdMo forums.

I am going to edit, straight through, from 3:15AM until 4:15. At this time I will entertain the prospect of checking gmail and livejournal, briefly. Or I may just decide to change CD's and keep going for another hour.

And... go!

[Edit 04:41]

I decided to make the block closer to an hour and 20 minutes or so, since I'm at work and I get distracted for a few minutes at a time here and there. An hour of solid work and I'm still only a little more than half way through Chapter 1, which is probably the chapter that is in the best readable shape to start with. Um, ouch.

I think I'll make use of the various crit communities I've joined over the next month, so I can crack open my first edit and get some comments when I'll really need them. After a first edit is *always* when I start to crave an unbiased outside opinion. It's sort of a wall, for me - okay, this is as good as I can make what I've got, does anything from the ground up need to be looked at, here?

Going to get some food, take a short break, and hopefully start another hour of editing around 05:15.

Not half bad, if I do say so myself...

So as of 07:42, I have actually completed 2 hours of editing during the course of my shift at work. Not only that, but I've gone through all of my prose right to the end of Chapter 2. It's still not perfect (*cough* will it ever be?) but it's tighter, more direct, less wandering. I'm actually pretty happy with the first several chapters of this draft, and I don't see them needing a hell of a lot of work - at least, not until I have a more stable complete draft to work from and assess. I may decide later that I need to bulk up Casey and Paul's school time, for instance, so I can ground them in that environment before having all hell break loose. I can easily see that happening, in fact. But for now, it's good. I'm doing a microscopic pass for now. I'll do the macroscopic pass later.

This isn't the stuff that's going to need the REAL work - that comes later, from when I hit rock bottom in NaNoWriMo terms and just needed to write, write, write, even if it killed me. Well it didn't kill me then, but it's got a good shot at it now. The padding is rampant, the direction is... not there, the focus is similar. A series of fairly reasonable events happens, but it's nested in sloppy prose and bad planning re: the physical locations and the "random alien" obstacles.

Actually, that's a good way to look at it. In the original version, the aliens were obstacles, nothing more. They need to be a living, breathing, thinking menace. And that's going to take a lot of work to fix in the prose (though the characterization is coming along well enough in the "behind the scenes" sense, which is a relief.)

I should probably forgo the hour of writing I was going to do over tea this morning (considering I have about a million other things to do, like clean and cook and... and... and...). But I don't wanna. I wanna get a walk in, and I wanna be a snooty tea-drinking writer. So there.