blink, blink

I have recently given up cooking. It's that bad. I'm doing 6-8 hours of revising and rewriting a day and when I finally look away from my computer screen it feels as though all my brain has turned to mush and I can't think anymore for the rest of the day. Deciding what to make for dinner is too complex. I'm progressing at a rate of a chapter every other day. I'm a slow writer. This is breakneck speed for me.

I'm glad it's going like this. I think I'm actually within 100 pages of the end of this draft. In the meantime, I'm just glad Andy is willing to make dinner and not make many other demands on me.

This is the first novel that has been worth revising. And the other ones, let's just say I wasn't as serious about them. So I have to wonder if this is what it is going to be like at the end of writing every novel. Will I always hit this pushing phase where I am otherwise useless to the world? The hardest part of writing this novel is really all the time its taken me to learn my own process of writing. I write in the mornings. Usually by hand, but when I get going I type, etc., etc. Each of the failed novels (5 of them) I got a little further along and a little better. This is the first time I've made it this far. I did them all in different ways (for 4 of them I had no outline or idea of where I was going. The only sad thing is that it took me FOUR failed novels to figure out that doesn't work for me. FOUR. Excuse me while I continue banging my head against a wall because I like it) until I finally figured out something that worked.

Now I'm figuring out rewrites. Sure, I've rewritten stories, but this is a tad bit... bigger. My longest short stories top out at 10,000 words. This is already at 90,000. We'll see where it ends up after the revisions. So it is a whole new game. It's taken me almost a year to do the first draft through the third draft. Will it always take that amount of time? Will I get faster at this once I know how this works? Will I ever feel like my brain is functioning again or is the mush thing permanent?

Ok. I'm off to sleep and then get back to work. I have another chapter that needs doing and I'm so very close.