This week’s long run

This week’s long run was in perfect, perfect, perfect weather, of the kind you can only dream of – not too cold, not too hot, with just the lightest of breezes to keep things interesting.

The gulls were still out in full force, taking advantage of the low tide and scaring most of the other birds away as they flocked along the river.

Still, I got to see two cormorants fishing, diving to great distances.

Or just hanging out on the trees:

A great 10k run, the last one before the Tel Aviv marathon.

Second draft

I just finished my second draft of my novel today. Yay!

It took me a lot longer than I thought to edit the middle chapters, mostly because there was a lot of rewriting to do there, and I let that discourage me. I froze. I procrastinated. I did everything but push through.

In the end the solution was pretty simple:

I made a plan and set a goal to finish the edit (about 75,000 words to go through) by the end of February. Instead of having a word count for how much I wrote, I had a word count for how much I edited. Instead of counting up (how many words left to write), I counted down (how many words left to edit).

I cut the larger goal to a word count goal for each day, and almost every day I managed to surpass my 1,200 “words edited” goal. I only missed two days for personal reasons, and I missed my daily goal only four times, on exceptionally busy days.

I tracked my progress in a Google sheet, with the following graph illustrating my progress:

Screen Shot 2018-02-03 at 20.06.38

I also managed to cut down my manuscript by 10%, which was another goal for my second draft, and a much more challenging one that I originally thought. It was worth doing, though, as the resulting narrative is better, tighter, and easier to read.

For my next draft I’m going to create a plan from the start, so that hopefully I won’t get bogged down again by my inner demons.