Garden of first drafts

Under the category of today's accomplishments: Finished a round of revisions to "The Blue Wall" which made the structure feel a great deal more solid. There's one more tiny angle I need to work in, and then some tweaking of descriptive details and language. The rough weighs in at 1,900 right now, which for official word count method will likely take it a little over the 2,000 word top limit for its intended market. Plus there's that additional angle I mentioned that still needs added. However, my first drafts are typically full of sloppy wording and fluffy bunny filler words, so I'm confident that tightening things up until it's back under 2,000 words won't be an issue.

I also exported it from WriteWay to my plain vanilla word processor for easier formatting of the finished product. In the process of looking at previous manuscripts to copy over the title page formatting, I realized that I have at least one, if not two, completed first drafts of nonfiction pieces for children. And the one I browsed for a few seconds is, at least at first glance, not a bad piece of work. It just got swept under the rug during that two or so year phase when I threw a tantrum and declared I was just going to give up on writing. So those go on my honeydew list, along with the first drafts of "The Blue Wall" and "Strong Enough" and Crowmaker. Lots of revising to do in the next few months. I think I can hold off on starting anything completely new for a while.

That ought to keep me busy enough to prevent any obsessing over the fates of "Pale Roses" and "But He Had Wings." One would think.

Joey was still running a fever last night, so I kept him home again today. No fever so far today, however, and that horrible-sounding cough has started to clear up. This is good.