Deadline's creeping up on me....

I have seven chapters left to edit. Fifty-four pages. And three days to do it if I want to reach my self-imposed deadline.

I've been averaging a chapter in the morning and a chapter in the evening, so in theory if I do one extra chapter in a session (and I know a couple of them are quite short) then I don't need to make any real extra time for it. Of course that doesn't allow for any additional scenes I might need to write in. So far I've added an extra ten or so - well, sort of. Some of them are really extensive rewrites rather than actual new scenes.

Anyway, one way or another I think I should be able to make it. It would be nice to be able to just say I'll take a morning, an afternoon, even a day and get it done, but unfortunately work is rather hectic at the moment so that's not really practical.

Once I'm done with this bit, of course, I'll have to figure out the best way to process the changes - I can't decide on the practicalities. On one hand, working in yWriter 5 is amazing - I love the way I can move scenes around and so on. On the other, though, I don't want to overwrite the original draft in that form, and it doesn't seem to come with a Save As button! If I were to work from an exported file, I'd have to do all the scrolling that comes with a long Word document, but I wouldn't be making any changes to the original. Decisions, decisions.

I decided a while ago that I wanted to try my hand at writing a short story, and with some considerable help from Thinking Sideways I've come up with an idea I really like. I've done some work on the idea and I think I have it pretty well mapped out, so before I start transferring all the edits I think I'm going to try and write that. It should mean that when I get back to it I'm a little more distanced again too, which will hopefully help.

As an extra bonus of the How To Think Sideways course (and yes, I know I'm linking to it a lot, but really, it's wonderful) I had the chance to submit up to 500 words to Holly Lisle for a new concept she's starting, the Writer Crash Test. Essentially, if she picks mine I'll get a free crit - but in video form, on the internet. If you visit the site you'll see that the first crit is up - and even if mine isn't used, I think it's going to prove to be quite a useful resource.

I'm currently on Lesson 7 of the course, which is to do with getting everything you need together before you start writing - pre-planning, if you will. It's not plotting, exactly, more getting particular ideas and conflicts in place. I'm just working through the theory at the moment but it will be interesting to apply it to both the short story and the novel idea I've had recently.

And I think that about wraps it up for now.