Desperate Times Call for Drastic Measures

Sometimes, you just have to lock yourself in a room and write.

Excuse the hyperbolic title. I’m spending the entire weekend alone in a hotel with my trusty Toshiba. I’ll be having pizza and Chinese food delivered and will probably spend a lot of time pants-free, pacing around and lost in thought. There may be some between-chapter napping.

The manuscript for Hate’s Profiting, the third and final novel in the Victoria da Vinci trilogy, is now 237 pages long. I call this Middle Draft Version A. I don’t anticipate the page count going up much, but I have plenty of dots to connect, dialogue to clean up, transitions to smooth out, incongruities and discontinuities to fix, descriptions to expand, exposition to trim, adverbs to purge, links to build, and extraneous verbiage and gratuitous details to expunge.

This will require many hours of editing and revising, for which I require long periods of quiet, distraction-free solitude. So I have removed myself from my floating sanctuary, where I am likely to be sidetracked by things like laundry that needs to be put away, dishes that need to be washed, topside teak that needs to be varnished, and mail that needs to be answered . . . not to mention the adorable, funny, sexy girl I live with, who is literally impossible to ignore.

Thus, I’ll be investing this entire evening (minus this short break to post this blog), then all day Saturday and all day Sunday right here, hacking away at this. My mission objective is to have a new stack of paper ready for one final ruthless read-through before I get back to the boat on Monday. I will call it Middle Draft Version B. That lovely and elusive creature, the Final Draft, drifts in the haze somewhere just over the ridge. But I still have to tunnel through a lot of rock before I can catch a clear glimpse of it.

All right, enough of this procrastination! We’ll call this a warm-up exercise. It’s time to set aside doubt and dread, put on my miner’s helmet, grab my pickaxe, and descend into the shadowy caverns of this unfinished book. I’ll see you on the other side.



My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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