The writing deadline I’ve set for myself (or rather my husband guilted me into setting) is looming ever closer and I’m working on reaching it. I’m not sure at this point what the WiP will look like at that point, though.

For the past few days I have been going painstakingly line by line over a printout of my WiP and making edits and pages of notes. There is something fundamentally different between scrolling with the click wheel down a page of text in the Word Processor versus sitting over it with a colored pen with proofreader’s marks. (For the most part I do use the formal notations but I have developed my own system after years of editing papers and stories.) It’s laboriously slow but the result has somewhat startled me. I’ve hacked and slashed a bunch of lines here and there, lines I’d skip over when scrolling because I “liked” them or because I remembered so vividly the day I wrote them. But now that they’re printed in front of me, they’ve been cut. It’s quite fun, being merciless! (Especially because I know I’ve saved a version of this, so the words will never be gone “forever”.)

I am starting to get impatient with finishing this. I feel like that’s a good sign. I keep daydreaming about scenes in it, too. Staring off into space at the gym on the elliptical, I sort of ignored my podcast and thought instead of my plot. Going through this draft like this has shown me its nitpicky errors but also its really lovely moments. I really love this story. It geeks me out, almost. It’s also the first entirely new story I’ve written since college. (The other drafts I’ve been cycling through either started in college or started before college.) This one I started this last January and it’s been purely a project of 2009. Part of me wants to bookend it thusly and just get it done before the new year. But the other part of me, the practical one, looks at my work schedule and thinks it can’t really be done. The husband even said to me yesterday, “Think of this deadline as a fictitious deadline. Because really, that’s all it is. It’s in our heads. There’s no real external pressure on you.” But that’s just it. Internal pressure is pretty darned effective too. I feel it weighing on me every day now. I’ve worked on four different drafts this year. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of brand new words in 2009. It’s time I finished this one and got on to the next. Boom, boom, done. Yes. (If I write it here, I will do it, I know it!)

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