Good news, bad news

New pages written: 0 (goal: 6.2 pages per day)
Old pages revised on paper: chapters 1-4 on screen
Pages of revisions typed in: 0
Pages lost or gained due to revisions: +2
Total page count to date: 158 (goal: 200)
Days remaining until D-day: 22 days
Emails from editor in UK: 0
Emails from agent in NY: 0

Chocolate consumed: English toffee from a candy store in LA's Farmer Market
Junk food consumed: Grande non-fat vanilla steamer from Starbucks, pizza
Exercise: Pilates homework
Television watched: None
Tears: None.
Fun link for the day: For Hayden fans! How would you like to wake up to him bringing you Starbuck's in the morning?

Tuesday was one of those good news, bad news days.

First, I had a nice visit with my friend in Lake Oswego who gave me the yummiest English Toffee to take home. Toffee is my fave candy. I have to force myself to stay away from Sees' Candies every time I'm at the mall due to my addiction to their Victoria Toffee. It's just too tasty. The toffee today was comparable. Maybe even a tad better. I'd need to do a side-by-side taste comparison to know for sure. I'm tempted, but the scale is finally moving in the right direction and I'm not ready to negate that with a toffee binge.

When I got home, the first five chapters of Last Man On Earth were back from my critique partner with her comments.

The good news? She could tell it wasn't a first draft and the writing is solid. So yeah! That cuts out a lot of work when I go back through.

The bad news? She wanted me to go deepen the emotion and character development in Chapters 4 and 5. Deepen a lot. Many, many pages of deepening.

I panicked. How was I going to do this? What should I do? How deep should I go? Should I finish the complete first or do this? Eating a piece of toffee helped calm me down a little. At least until the sugar kicked in. Then I got to work.

I rewrote a passage she said was really all about the race and had nothing going on with the characters, etc. I reread what I'd written. And reread. Still feeling panicked and now clueles, I pasted the passage into an email addressed to my critique partner. The subject line was brief and to the point, "Better?"

We usually don't resend revised work to one another, unless 1) we're on a really tight dealine or 2) wigging out. Since I qualified for both, I hit send without a moment of hesitation. I wanted (okay, needed) to know I was on the right track.

I got this reply: This is great. Yes. They're confiding in one another, he's noticing details. The tie to the past is significant because it impacts the here and now AND he is challenging her to grow. Really good job!

Huge sigh of relief. On a roll, I forgot about adding any new pages for the day and started at the beginning of the book. I made it through the first four chapters until tiredness took over. (It's after midnight now.) After the rewrites, I only increased the page count by two pages, but the book is stronger now which is all that matters in the long run. I'll revise chapter five later today, then go through chapters six and seven before moving forward again.

One more bad news item... a snow storm has been forecasted to hit the Portland area sometime this morning. I love snow. Snow=skiing. At least it did before kidlets, but I'm hoping soon that will be true again. But for now, snow=no school. That means no writing for me. Something I can't really afford right now because not only do I have a deadline at the end of the month, but a ski trip planned. The skiing falls before the deadline so that means I have to be pretty much done with the book before I head down to stay with my friend at her place in Bend. Plus I promised her she could read the book so it must be done! Early. Yikes.

That means if it really is snowing when I wake up, I want it to snow enough that hubby has to stay home, too! That's the only way a snow day's going to work around here. Time for a snow dance!