Goodbye Summer Break!

I go back to work tomorrow. I'll be up at 6 or 6:30am by the latest. The coffee is ready to start. My lunch is so not packed. My clothes are set out though. 2 out of 3 isn't too bad I guess. I'm ready to get back to work.

The cats finally had their baths yesterday and today thanks to my 13 year old cousin. She wanted to do it. Yea, I know right? Weird-o. But I was sure to thank her from the bottom of my lazy heart.

I got a lot done over the break. Thanks to Steven, my 8 separate files for Immo2 morphed into 1 large manuscript weighing in at over 131,000 words. Cripes. I whittled away about 150 words today just by doing a spotty adverb purge. It took all damn day long. I fixed the chapter, section, and paragraph breaks yesterday. It took several hours but not nearly as long as today's project.

I nuked the file so now comes the fun part. This is my project list for now:

• I have to go back in and fix all of the italics that I use for telepathic dialogue.
• I have to do a full read-through to make sure the timeline for narrative and dialogue matches.
• I need to pare down some of this, as my gut says it shouldn't be more than 110k words.

The first project will not take long. I thought about doing it as I did the read-through but that would take away from tracking the timeline so I'm going to do them separately. Time consuming but its part of it. I'll spend the next couple days after work fixing italics then start the read-through. Hopefully, my read-through will be done by the end of the week. Any fixes from the read-through will hopefully be finished by the end of the following week. Then comes the really fun part (I hope you catch the sarcasm)... attempting to cut over 20k words from my baby. Ugh. Steven I hope you are prepared for the epic bitching I will be doing as a result.

For now, I'm pleased with all the work that has went into this. It took 2 NaNoWriMos to get the story written and then several months of procrastination to get to this point. Maybe we'll be ready to start working on a title/cover/synopsis/etc by January. I certainly hope so as I would really like to have it ready on or around the 1st week of March to match up with Journey of Shadows release from this year. We'll see. I will let you know the progress as it happens for sure.

The kids have been enjoying the heck out of their summer break. They were not very happy when I reminded them that they only have about a month of summer vacation left. Back to school. Back to school! Yaaaaaaa! haha If only they were as excited as I am.

Love is love, no matter the back story. <3 DS