February has been an interesting month for my family. I don't really want to go into a ton of details in a public place like a blog, but I will say that three of the four of us were hit with the flu; it's been a rough month, especially the second half, and we're not all fully recovered even yet.
Despite that, I wrote throughout the month. When I had the flu, I still wrote my 1,000 words per day. Maybe it was a little obsessive to do so, but I felt I needed to get the words written every day.
Well, I didn't write 1,000 words every day. I finished Part One of the novel on February 5. Immediately after that, instead of writing, I spent almost a week revising and making major cuts to Part One. As I said last month, I realized my novel was getting too long, so I re-read all 286 pages (91,461 words), asking myself if I really needed that section of the novel, if I really needed that subplot. I then re-read Part One AGAIN, re-reading each sentence to see if there weren't a shorter way to write each (I was amazed, by the way, by the number of "that"'s I used that were entirely unnecessary. Not wrong, just not needed. 100's of them over the course of Part One. I'll highlight in red throughout this blog similar "that"'s that don't need to be there.). In the end, I cut Part One down to 253 pages and 81,699 words. I was thus able to cut about 11 percent of the novel out. I'm still a little worried, though, as I think Part One is going to be about half of the novel, and I'm really trying to keep the novel under 500 pages. Way under 500 pages. I may have to cut again.
Some of the cuts were painful; one section in particular that I decided to abandon wholesale represented more than an entire day of writing. But I watched a video somewhere early in the month wich gave me a lot of hope. It was an audio only YouTube video that included all of the songs cut out of the final version of the Tony-award winning play Hamilton. There were some 20 minutes of songs cut out of the musical, and for the most part they were really, really good. But the play overall is better without them, and like this novel, would have been way too long with them. So I actually watched that video a couple of times, telling myself it was good to be reminded that just because a piece of writing was well written didn't mean it needed to be kept.
Anyway, as of today, I have written 317 pages and 99,241 words, and if I had to guess I'd say I'm somewhere between a third of the way and halfway through Part Two. I expect by the end of March to be finished with Part Two and working somewhere in Part Three, and if that works out, I should finish the novel by the end of April, which is about what I expected when I started.
