furnace weather

A sure sign of autumn in Colorado:  the furnace came on this morning. The house smells like heat. Time to get out sweaters, maybe.

In other news, yesterday I rather suddenly and unexpectedly finished the second of the 3/4 finished manuscripts from The Year of Stalled Projects. This feels a lot better than I was expecting. It means I have a novel draft. It’s no longer abandoned. I no longer have to worry about how I’m going to go back and piece together what I was trying to do, which gets harder the more time passes. Finishing this was an unexpected victory when I kind of needed one.

This one, I printed it off and read everything over, and much like the other one I could see exactly where I lost confidence in my entire career and started wandering around and not knowing what I was doing. I had 72,000 words, and it was so depressing to not have a complete thing out of all that. So. I cut about 12,000 words out of this one, and rewrote almost the whole second half, then took the voice/tone I had developed in that rewrite and went back over the first half, streamlining and pumping it up. I changed the title. I added chapter headers.

I sent it to my agent.

Now we wait, and now I figure out what to work on next.

Meanwhile, I’m beta reading something that would make lots of you jealous if I told you what it was, and Murphy’s Law of Library Holds means that my library holds all came in this week too. Which means maybe I should curl up with tea and books and just enjoy the fall weather.