Yeah so, everyone's having a great time right now and all I'm thinking is "summer sucks. The 4th of July is a boring holiday. It's hot and uncomfortable. My body is swelling from the heat and exacerbating my IBS. PLEEEEEASE, OCTOBER, HURRY UP." But it won't hurry up, it's going to get here when it feels like it.

The last 24 hours have been good, though, like, all things considered. 

The Phantom of the Opera (ALW/Broadway production) is touring and will be here in Portland next month, so to get myself all revved up for it, I kicked off a month of daily Phantom trivia posts on my HT facebook page. Ironically, I will probably try not to talk about ALW too much, since there are plenty of other interesting things and I'm realizing not everyone HAS READ THE BOOK? WTF, WHY NOT? This is the source material? It's awesome? If I can get one person who hasn't read the book to read it because of intriguing trivia posts, then I will be happy. 

Luckily, the discourse this has generated has also got me ready to tackle more HT. In fact, I was able to sit down with it and not be horribly confused, so that's good. I started adding things that I had wanted to add and get a feel for what the story is going to be like once some revisions are made to the most recent events. While I was doing this, I was also having a conversation with a reader-friend from the FB page who was also working on her story. I have a feeling that she looks up to me in a way, because she told me she has started her own page, set up a Google Drive to share chapters, and was asking me questions about how to get her work more exposed, so I'm hoping I've set a good example/offered good advice.

She was saying how she'd written "a few chapters" in the last week and had been going through older chapters changing stuff to fit in "new characters" and such, and it kind of surprised me, though. Like, I don't know the quality of her work or the degree to which she thinks it out, but for me it's a huge fucking deal to complete a few chapters -- that's more than 1-2 months of work typically. My pace is about a page an hour. loolol And new characters? Forget it, I ZONE IN FOREVER on the ones I've got. Changes of any kind to past events also make me very sensitive to how they might possibly affect the present -- it's like that time travel trope where you don't want to end up being your own grandma or some shit. It's an ordeal for me to genuinely decide "okay, this chunk of narrative has to be hauled back on the operating table," and I try to avoid that by overthinking and over-editing in the moment. 

There isn't anything inherently wrong with this approach, as far as I can see. This reader-friend might have gone through 10 drafts of her aspiring novel so far, but I feel confident that my second draft really is as set and polished and properly thought out as Patrice said, whether or not she finished reading the print-out I gave her. All that over-thinking and doing a page an hour... well, I think I'd prefer it to writing ten whole drafts that I wasn't happy with because I breezed through them, unable to make up my mind what the story was even supposed to be like.

But yeah, anyway, we were both up to the same thing, with very different attitudes about it. All the while, I sat in the living room with the curtains parted, breathing some fresh air, sipping a hot drink. It was nice. I open tomorrow at work, but if it's possible to do that again tonight, I want to. It was a slightly different environment that may have been unclogging my head a little, if you know what I mean. There is no comparison to making ground with a writing project. Last night held a little glimmer of hope that HT wouldn't be stuck in a quagmire. Working on it, getting lost in it again, would definitely make summer past by more quickly.

-J

P.S. Unrelated but TOMOKO GOT MY PACKAGE and we squeaked back and forth at each other in joy and merriment. I love herrrrrrrrrr

When you're a procrastinator like me, who also gets tossed around by life's crap, you can never actually expect to get where you want. So to be able to announce today that all the heavy rewriting for your novel is done is pretty damn fantastic! Done!

Perfect? Well... It's come a long way. Still has room to be tweaked. But everything is there to be tweaked!

I'm having a little bit of trouble adulting right now, so this silly schedule they gave me all week (11:30am-7:30pm) only leaves room for me to wake up late, go to work, and cram in errands and self-care. However, I will try to dig my hands into the pot of events I've copy-pasta'd from draft one into two "CH15" and "CH16" documents. I've got the clay, now I mold it!

The superfluous stuff will be pruned out, what worked in those events will be kept and expanded upon with my new notes, and a few settings will be changed. Unlike in the first draft, the theater is off limits for a little while. As he put it to Giry, some things got stirred up there that can't be immediately settled. So yeah, he has to actually avoid it, try to get Lily to meet him other places. It's gonna be a little awkward, I think! Especially awkward because the next time Lily sees him, he has promised to explain how he knows her, and this scene won't be guarded and passive the way he was in the first draft. It seemed appropriate to nod to Leroux's scene in which Erik admits he's not the Angel of Music. Soooo!... yeah

It's gonna be quite something, to get into that... Looking forward to it, probably going to act it out a little, so I'm not missing any of the more subtle emotional shifts as certain things are said. Sometimes one character hears something, has a small physical reaction to it, and that has a domino effect. The first character picks up on it, maybe changes course, maybe backs out of what they were saying, has to be re-engaged, learns something they weren't expecting. The list goes on and on.

Well, there goes my morning. Already. ugh Such a stupid schedule, right in the smack-motherfucking-dab middle of the day. ugh Also it's hot and I have my period.

*blows raspberry* This day can go fuck itself, already.

P.S. I have used the word "professional" in the last entry, and there is something to do with that word that happened in chapter nine.

What the hell, I'll share it:

She wouldn't stop staring at me at lunch. The entire forty five minutes was dashed with bickering about whether I would share more details. It wasn't enough to say that hardly anything had happened at all. "You've curled your hair today. What's up with that?" She asked. Nothing, I said. "I have never seen that flower before." Well I got a new one, I said. "You're acting like-- like... You and the Phantom didn't already like, do it, did you?"

"WHAAAAAAAAAAAT?!" I screeched, so loud that Mrs. Vardega snapped her neck in our direction, and we had to apologize for startling her. It wouldn't happen again, we promised.

"I'm just kidding. I know it would take you a million years just to dry-hump," she said under her breath, but that wasn't even the cruelest thing she did. The cruelest thing was that she proceeded to stuff her mouth full of food and give me ten or fifteen uninterrupted seconds to think about what dry-humping the Phantom would have been like. Apparently, the conclusion I had come to was all over my face when she bothered to look at me again, and the questioning got even more passionate.

"Look, we just had a short meeting the other night..."
"NIGHT!"
"Yes, night. We have talked about this before. Anyhoo, we had a very short meeting just to talk about how we would go forward. It was practical, professional-"
"PROFESSIONAL. What, did you bring your briefcases?" Neither of us were expecting to find that so funny, so we face-planted into the opposite arms of the couch.

I already told her this, but Mariam is super cute and reminds me of my friend Gianna. I think she went into the character without me even knowing.