Strange July

This has been a bizarro couple of weeks. Last week, for about seven days straight, I was an emotional PMS-y wreck. I'm not usually a cry-er, other than PMS, but even then, it's like maybe once or twice a whole month. But last week PMS from hell decides to descend out of nowhere and there was one day I swore I woke up crying and went to bed crying!! It was like some strange weepy robot had taken over my body!

And this week - ta da! Back to my normal happy go lucky self. Bizarro and disturbing. But back to the good times. Which this week has been, with minor interruptions of wanting to pull out my hair because I feel overwhelmed with the Persphone novel for young adults I've been working on for about four years. I finished it... again. And it's much, much, much better than the draft I did two years ago. And the story I think is solidly good. It's logical and I've worked hard to make it move, move, move. But now I have this 300 page bohemouth to edit. I feel like every time I work through and cut and hack and edit a chapter, then print it out, a hundred new things pop up to fix. So I never get forward, because you can always perfect what has been already edited. It seems like an impossible, never-ending process, and how is one person supposed to do this?? I keep thinking about those damn thank-you pages at the end of novels where they list off a ton of people who helped them and I'm like - YES! - you need a freaking team to produce a book. How is one person supposed to do all this?!!

I'm still going to my writer's group, but it takes a month to work through two chapters, and my finished version is twenty-one chapters. And I'm freaking impatient. I think impatience might be one of my defining characteristics actually.

So today I sat my butt down in a chair for five hours and made a detailed outline. There's just so much that happens in a novel, how can you even begin to grasp the whole thing in the same scope? I keep trying. At least paging through the entire thing and pointing out the key moments of each chapter and scene did get me really excited about it. I think in the end, this can be something special. But then I try to tamp down those feelings, because I thought similar things about the draft two years ago, and it was crap. Anyway, I'm still aiming for workable draft by the end of the summer that I'll start submitting out places. Then I'll have school to occupy my time, which will give me four months away from it, and fresh eyes to edit again at Christmas, and send out more places. My eyeballs hurt from looking at the computer screen all day. And how did it get to be the end of freakin' July already???