Not this morning. It’s hard, I know, because so much is going on that I could comment about, but…
The novel revision I mentioned a couple of posts back is done. Done and at my agent. I did a top to bottom revision, adding in the new material that desperately wanted to be included, and except for yesterday it all went remarkably well.
Yesterday, though…yes…Murphy was in residence.
We went to the gym and then Donna had an errand to run, so I descended to the dungeon office and began. I’d already started the final work on the last chapter a couple days earlier, but I had Other Things To Do on both Tuesday and Wednesday that kept me away. That was fine, it gave my subconscious time to work out some kinks and so I was more than ready to work on the remainder.
It was good stuff. I say that because much of it is gone. I practically rewrote the entirety of the last chapter and I was very carefully laying in the new material and deleting the old as I went. But I became caught up in the work—it happens—and neglected to hit SAVE as often as I should. (Yes, I have a timed save, but it was not quickly enough to prevent what happened.)
Revisions complete, I had a large chunk of old text to delete and I proceeded to highlight it for destruction and—
It crashed. Don’t know why or how but suddenly WordPerfect complained (it never does this!) and shut down. When I rebooted I found everything intact, but now I had this little box telling me that since it hadn’t exited properly, in order to preserve the back-up I had to open it and rename it, which I tried to do, but something was preventing it from “taking” so I tried cutting and pasting to get the changes into the original and then it crashed again and—-
The long and the short of it is, I lost my revisions on the last chapter. All of them.
By which time Donna was home and I was fuming. No, that’s not quite it. I was in a blood-red, Conanesque rage, stomping around the house, yelling, cursing computers and the spawn that created them, almost but not quite punching things.
We had lunch. I returned to the deeps, sucked it up, and started over.
In all this, I had forgotten the dog. Coffey still needed her walk and I forgot. I’m a bad owner. Donna came down and asked if I wanted her to take Coffey and after a few minutes of guilt-ridden negotiation, she did.
And I finished the last chapter.
Then I went on to make the final corrections to the epilogue, saved the puppy, and sent it to my agent. (And then another weird thing happened to it, but that’s all straightened out now, so never mind.)
When I began the revisions, the manuscript was just a hair under 90 thousand words.  It’s gained 4,000 and a lot more cohesion. In my humble opinion, it works now, whereas before it merely sufficed.
You might get the impression from the foregoing that I don’t enjoy my work. Quite the contrary, the reason I tolerate these little instances of Murphyesque meltdown it because I love it. I slept the sleep of the righteous last night, and this morning I am thinking back over the work and smiling. Though I know I have at least one more pass to get through with it, when Stacia gets done making all her notes and edits, at this point I am pleased with the product.
What I now have to do, which is long, long overdue, is clean the dungeon office. I have piles of stuff everywhere. It’s been a few years since I’ve done a really thorough cleaning in here, which includes new bookshelves, sorting through notes that have lost all significance, finding things I’ve forgotten I misplaced, and just generally making the room livable. When I work on a novel, there is a kind of conservation of chaos at work—as order increases in the story upon which I labor, a commensurate increase in disorder occurs in the immediate environment. So as the novel nears completion, its maximum point of order, the room falls apart in near ruin.
In the last few years, I have written one and a half new novels and rewritten two from top to bottom, without pause. You can imagine the task before me.
So…is Gingrich still the GOP frontrunner?
