Writing Report #17: Tired & Low Morale

This writing report is for last Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday (22/09/2016 - 25/09/2016)

Thursday and Friday represented the last leg of my journey in my self-edits. On Thursday, I completed chapter 10 to 11, and on Friday, 12 to 13. I discovered that, that's as far as I needed to go. It was here that a chapter was deleted due to redundancy and poor pacing, and the subsequent chapter was clearly edited.

So ends my final authorial edits, and so began the application of my proofreader's edits. And how appropriate it would be that we hit this climax with a huge problem!

See, I got the blues, coloured like I was choking to death. Pfffffffffff... Let's just say I'm a little tired of going through my own novel from start to finish. To have done it for the past month and then losing something like a week's work and then redoing those too? Yeah, it's so exhausting, I feel like putting out my eyes.

But I must go on. On Saturday, I did only Chapter 0 - The prologue - though. I was just feeling too down. On Sunday, I did the next 2 chapters. It's projected that I need to do 4 chapters if I want to come close to following the schedule.

The easy part is that following my proofreader's work is easier than self-editing, because I'm only taking suggestions, deciding if they're right and putting them in. The hard part is the above - fighting fatigue and low morale. It's that switch in me that says 'Man, I need to put aside my manuscript for the next time I edit!', except this is the final edit... At least until I want to work on a 2nd edition.

The one thing I'm glad for is that my proofreader, despite her inexperience, has proven herself quite capable of holding her own. Abigail's her name, or Abby for short. She had a master's in some engineering course, but she's a lifelong avid reader, and she'd written for amusement on her own. It shows.

I still don't know if I can do up 4 chapters a day. My contingency plan is to release the novel with half the proofreader's input, but then it may not be up to me. Abby'd upped her pace, but she's still not fast enough to finish by the 10th-15th October.