New Beginnings

That scheduling thing worked well for me yesterday, so I'm giving it another go today. We'll see how long this lasts. I have a bad tendency to come up with new systems, get very enthusiastic with them, and then have them fall by the wayside after maybe a week. I also tend to have a natural aversion to schedules. I love a day with nothing on the calendar and start to feel trapped when there's too much on the calendar, so I don't know how having a day full of scheduled items will affect me. On the other hand, having those nagging little items scheduled takes away the stress of deciding when to do them and makes me less likely to keep putting them off for another day or two (or more). What may help with the scheduling aversion is that these things aren't on my calendar. I'm just putting times on my to-do list.

I got my page proofs yesterday, and the inside of this book is going to look so cool. They did some neat stuff with the chapter headers. Here's a peek at the opening of the book:

I haven't yet delved into it beyond that. I want to get this round of rewrites done before I shift gears. I spent most of yesterday on a single scene, but it was the big turning point in changing events, so it took a lot of work to combine multiple scenes from various points in the book into one scene at this point in the book. I also realized that I need to develop a character. There's a character whose introduction I'm moving to earlier in the book so she plays a greater role, and I had just let her come to life without figuring out anything about her, including her name (she's the grandmother of a character, so I just was using the name the other character calls her). So that meant an epic search for my "name your baby" book and some time flipping through that. Now I just have to look at each scene in terms of what this character would do now that she's been added. Already I can see that her dialogue will be a ton of fun to write.

Now that I'm past that initial hump, the rest may go smoothly, though there may be some resistance at the "but I liked this scene the way it was, how can I save it?" points.

Two weeks from tomorrow, I go on vacation (and I'm hoping to go into vacation mode two weeks from yesterday), so I have a lot of work to get done in the next week and a half.