The Benefits of Sloth

I got a reprieve on the early Saturday choir rehearsal, which means I suddenly have a free weekend. I guess none of us yet knew the music well enough for a combined choir rehearsal to be worthwhile, so it was moved to February. Note to my friends: this does not mean that I am now looking for something to do. I plan to dive into that pile of books I got from the library and maybe do some baking. Besides, the following weekend, which was going to my my "free" weekend, has now filled up. And that means February has now filled up.

I now have maybe ten more pages to go in the revisions. I think most of this will be tweaking and cutting because I believe I've handled the major issues. It turned out that the solution to one of my major problems was to go back to an earlier draft. There was an event that in the most recent draft I'd abruptly switched to have happen to a different character, but now I've realized that was the wrong thing to do. I'm still wavering a bit about where this event should go, since I just came up with a new idea for moving it, but that means tweaking some points of view around. I must ponder this.

Fortunately, I've already taken care of my errands for the day, so I have the whole afternoon for theoretically uninterrupted work. It's possible that I could even finish today. I'll still need to give it a good read-through, but I'll be ready for the next set of revision notes on another project I should be getting from my agent very soon. And then I've got another book I need to start working on. There are also a few other things I've back-burnered that I need to deal with.

In other news, I have a new favorite animal. We were talking about fast and slow tempos in children's choir last night, and there's a piece of music to use that goes back and forth between slow tempos and fast tempos. I turned it into a game of pretending you're a slow animal in the slow parts and a fast animal in the fast parts. My teen helper came up with the brilliant idea of being a sloth, and then all the kids wanted to be sloths, so they just sat there, quietly, for quite some time. We may play the sloth game more often. If I tell them to sit still and be quiet, they'll never do it, but if I tell them that they're sloths, it just might work.