I think living in Ireland is going to prove very good for my productivity, because I’m a minimum of 5 hours and a maximum of 9 hours ahead of everybody I’m accustomed to interacting with. When I get up in the morning, everybody else is going to bed. This means there’s no one to talk to online, which reduces the urge to dink around all day enormously.
To wit, I have gotten through 3 chapters of HEART OF STONE this morning. Not much in the way of genuine forward motion–maybe 500 words added or so, but relationships are being rearranged and scenes rewritten and so on and so forth. My thought right now is to go through the whole manuscript and get the bones of the changes down; I’ll go through it at least two more times fleshing things out, but right now I’m doing the restructuring of relationships that needs to be done, sort of shifting everything *forward*, or that’s what it feels like, anyway. I’m enjoying it, at this point.
It’s interesting; my contract specifies a manuscript of approximately 125,000 words. This is interesting for two reasons: one, the Walker Papers contracts are for 110K, despite the Old Races being mass market paperbacks and the Walker Papers being trade paperbacks. Two, the manuscript I turned in for HEART OF STONE initially was just *under* 100K (this was after adding eighty pages in revisions (which is somewhat misleading, as I also cut at least twenty pages during that round of revisions, so with my final manuscript pagecount being 80 pages more than the original, I added at least a hundred pages) then cutting another 30 in another round of revisions). I have license to add a *hundred pages*, and in fact had *better* add something nigh unto that to meet the contract. Did I mention I’m having fun? And that GOD am I glad to have settled on a place to live? And that it’s a 6 month lease, so if it proves awful (which it won’t) or if disaster strikes or Ted finds the perfect job 70 miles away, we’ll be able to move in relatively short order?
On a totally different note, I’m feeling the urge to cut my hair. I think I need to redye it, this time to the color I was trying for in the first place. Perhaps that will take care of it. Because I am *not* cutting my hair before X3 comma dammit.
Even if X3 is going to *suck*.
:P
Off to wander Dublin now! :)
I realy hope X3 won’t suck outright. I’m trying to be optimistic.
And I’m right there with you on Harry Potter. Most of my friends are fools who think the last movie was better, but I think that the pacing in this one was ever so much improved. And you agree with me. Which means I just *have* to be right.
X3 is going to suck. If by some incredible miracle it does not suck, I will be as thrilled, delighted and astonished as I was that X-Men did not suck. I have absolutely *no* hope, though. None.
But we’re right about Harry Potter. :)