commence cringing

Icky rough draft is now with thesis advisor. The syllabus says to send it in "in whatever state," so I take that to mean it can be icky right now. At least it's more organized and properly formatted. I've added in a lot of NB notes to myself about places where I could expand scenes or things I need to look up, so at least my advisor knows I know what needs work and revision. Right now, it's 186 pages. I expect to add another 100 pages or so before this endeavor is finished. I'm aiming for about a 300-page finished draft of this novel.

The more I work on it, the more it gets smidgens better. I think the overall story is solid, and my effort will be in the details to tell the whole thing. It's one thing to say a story idea is good. It's something else to lay it all out and prove that it is. That's where the cringing comes in - will others see it as a solid story too, or am I just delusional?

I'm also realizing that I'm not a fast writer when it comes to fiction. Science writing I can crank out at a faster pace, and I can see parts and whole pretty much at the same time. Fiction, however, requires me to slow down and break things down into really small chunks to work on individually to make them complete. I've started putting page breaks between scenes because if I don't, the story starts veering off or petering out, and I get lost and lose steam.

I'm getting a lot of my guided reading in audiobook format as well as paper format. I figure I can listen to the books while I work on my drafts and be efficient. Since I listen to so much radio and TV (rarely actually watch the screen these days), I may pick up things in the stories audibly that I don't catch when I read them. I still need the paper copies to feed my taking-notes-in-the-margins habit, though.

Time to get away from the laptop and crochet for an hour. I'm making a striped scarf out of Caron's Country yarn, which is made in Turkey. I've got four pretty colors of it (chocolate, spice, forest, and charcoal). It's a 12-ply yarn, and I'm using a smaller hook than I normally use. However, I like the drape and smoothness of it, and even though the skeins are small, I'm getting a lot of stitches out of them. It's turning out well so far.