I've been looking at the old words for this book

... and they are very, very, very different than the words that are the book now.

I may have attempted to preserve one scene from those words. Again. I should really know better =/. The two books are not the same. They are not, at this point in the text, recognizable as the same books, although the characters have remained themselves.

I am ahead of the chapter I just posted - but I often want to be ahead because I end up scrapping things when they don't work or they're not quite there yet >.<. So I guess technically the first draft here is the draft I think is substantially the actual book, but with more typos and errors than the finished book should have.

In this case, the bit I wanted to preserve cannot, of course, be preserved in this book because it's from a different book. But... I believed I could. Because clearly I have to pound my head against the nearest wall to make certain it's actually still a wall...

***

I have been venturing out into the land of bad news and clickbait a bit more; I think my feet are more firmly under me, metaphorically speaking. The writing is going well, although I did just get my revision letter for the Cast novel, so writing brain and revision brain are fighting for space at the moment. I do know authors who can do both - they write new words, and then turn to revising old words, and they don't skip a beat.

I tend to trip all over my feet if I'm in revision mode; it's a mindset in which one looks only for flaws and things that need fixing - somehow. But I am continuing to write new words, in part because so many of the attempt at new words was hampered by my unfortunate belief I could do something I could not do.

My family is well; no one is sick. But my husband lost a co-worker to covid, which was a shock to everyone, because he'd spoken with him on the phone the night before he passed. We now all know people directly who have had covid; it's awful, it's a miserable flu, and they (slowly) recover. So we intellectually understood that death still does happen from covid - but it was intellectual.

The store at which I work still has a mask policy in place. Some people have sworn and walked out; more people have thanked us. It's tricky; the urge to say "it's just a flu" becomes more powerful as the yearning for normal - I have not eaten inside a restaurant since our first lockdown in early 2020 - rises. To me, it was heading in that direction.

Now, we've been heavily reminded.

I hope you are all safe & healthy.

***

This post is mirrored from https://michellewest.ca/

I find it hard to have a conversation on Patreon, and have created a WordPress Patreon only blog to make it easier for me to find new comments and respond to them, sometimes at length.

This post is https://michellewest.ca/2022/05/28/ive-been-looking-at-the-old-words-for-this-book/; you should be able to hit Login with Patreon, and should be able to read posts there at the same levels you can read them here.

I'll answer comments here as well if this is your preferred format, but probably not as expansively (which might be a good thing!).