Romancing the Plot.

I got a babysitter today. I’ve been skimming Danielle’s revision notes for the last week, but I hadn’t quite managed to get up the nerve to sit down and *really* go through them.

Part of this is time, or lack thereof. Part of it is that I’m probably just a big-ass coward.

But today, I figured no more excuses. (Plus I’m going to be chatting with her on the phone tomorrow and it would probably help if I knew what I was going to talk about. LOL.) Conveniently enough, my cousin is home from college on Spring Break, so I took advantage of her starving student status and offered her about 5 hours of work. Not that the kids are a tremendous amount all the time, but I really wanted some daylight hours to sort through the entire manuscript and all the notes (and make notes of my own), without being pulled away for mundane things like potty trips and snack detail. Which maybe makes me sound petty, but honestly, it’s hard for me to find time to get into the “zone.” Once I’m there, I don’t like to be pulled away, especially given the time press I’m currently under and the sheer amount of information I need to absorb.

The Toblerone bar is about half-way gone, for those of you who keep track of such things.

In either case, I went through every single page – highlighted, underlined and sticky noted what I could. Jotted down notes in a separate notebook for additional plot ideas. I will have to be careful, though – I have a tendency to over-think things, and while change is good, I’m not sure I want to completely rewrite *everything.*

Overall, it’s not as bad as I feared. It’s still going to require a fair amount of work on my part (and while I don’t think I’ll have to entirely scrap what I’ve already written for Book 2, I can see where there will be a fair number of changes needed. But good ones.)

Still, in looking at the amount of revisions, there’s a small part of me that wonders at how I managed to get picked up in the first place. Not that I’m questioning it, mind…but there is definitely that little niggle of doubt that makes me think I lucked into this whole publishing gig a lot sooner than I should have.