Here I go again, giving a chapter-by-chapter account of my progress through yet another rewrite of my novel, The Sleep of Reason. As I said in my last post, I haven’t faced any severe difficulty in transitioning my text from first person to third person, but I’m sure it’s raw and clumsy. I’ll need to go through it again to polish it. Again. What a tedious word that has become!
I have two laptops before me. One has the text of the earlier draft on it. I type into the other laptop. You’d think that would be easy, but I’m making huge numbers of typing errors, especially missing the letter “a” when I type. I think it has something to do with having my eyes elsewhere than the screen on which my words appear.
The new chapter weighs in at 8,936 words. The first-person draft was 8,825, and the first draft of it was an anemic 8,768 words. The beast is growing more woolly. What’s more, somewhere in the middle of those words I realized that I am going to retype every single word, every single character. The last draft was more than 109,000 words. Every bit of it will be typed once again by my crabbed and aching paws. Oh, pity me!
Nonetheless, I still feel as strongly as ever about the worthiness of this novel.
