The End of A Round of Words in 80 Days - What. I. Did.

sually on the end run of a marathon or challenge I'd be there in the trenches logging hours and hours of writing or editing (as I did with NaNoWriMo last year (though not the year before!)).




This time around, though, I'm doing overtime at work, so the last week of A Round of Words in 80 Days is a washout. Nearly - I woke up this morning with a fully formed scene and scribbled it out on the train ride in. It's so easy, suddenly, to write, when I'm supposed to be editing.

On the other hand... the weekend looms large with no plans. I hope to print out the entire ms of Out of the Water, hole up in a coffee shop (hopefully they have decent music playing) away from everyone and the internet, and:

1. rewrite chapter 1
2. condense all of the scenes between the time Rosa and Baha have their first, ahem, encounter, and the time they get married/arrive in Constantinople
3. line edit the last 90 pages

On the other hand, as Kait says, ROW80 is all about what we did accomplish, and I definitely did a lot more editing than I might have without a challenge to keep me in check - half the novel is in way better shape than it was back in January. Lots of smaller scenes were edited even further so that I could share them on my blog or on the Compuserve Books and Writers Community. I've, currently, a fairly long scene of romance and tension up on the Compuserve site, if anyone would like to take a peek.

The novel has bloomed this past 80 days, from c. 120,000 words to nearly 150,000. I hope that this will make the next round of edits easier, as I have so much room to cut words. I snipped off nearly a hundred in the past week or so as I trawled through and deleted many of the -ly adverbs, and the word 'only' from as many places as possible. Discovered in the process that I sure use the word 'family' a lot!

All of this has left me in good shape, I think, for Round 2 of ROW80. This time around, I'd like to focus more on the research side of things, so that I can remove all the pesky square brackets ("she added [wood chips] to the [brazier] and sat on the [divan] to remove her [salvar]"). It's always the small details that require the most research: how much time does it take to sail from Thessalonika to Constantinople? What kind of boots would a 15th Century Spanish girl wear? What do you call a waiter in a taverna in Ottoman Greece? How big/small is a cabin on a caravel? How do you wash wooden or pewter dishes? And so on...

Other stuff:

My review of The Wrong Target by Sherry Gloag is up on the One Hundred Romances Project.

Lots of exciting items to bid on over at Write Hope - all proceeds go to Save The Children's emergency relief fund for Japan.

Michael has a Harry Potter blogfest on next week! Which two characters would be your best mates if you attended Hogwarts?