The Grind, Week 2

Remember sleep? I don't. I bet sleep was nice.

Things are going great. This blog post will probably be short because I want to stay laser focused. To remind readers, my goal is to create second drafts of two novels in two weeks, before my vacation, which includes a rather large pile of critique notes. That involved about 90-110 hours a week including my normal day job and drive times (I think the first week shook out at about 98 due to prior commitments). And between 5-6 hours sleep a night. On Friday night I slept in a whole 8 hours.

Things went well the first week I edited my cyberpunk murder mystery. I started on Saturday afternoon and I finished then next Saturday evening. I'm pretty happy with the results. I was worried that I'd feel rushed and while the pace was certainly punishing, it really made it MUCH easier to keep it all in my head at once. It's hard to tell how many details I would have caught if it had been spread over my more typical two weeks, but I was routinely noticing details at the end of the book that contradicted little things I'd said at the beginning of the book. Often, I'm still finding those on the third or fourth draft, but it's vitally important you catch them all in a mystery.

So now I've started the draft of DbC 3. I'm feeling pretty good about how things are going. Here's the thing, though. The edits for DbC 2 are just coming in from the publisher. That's only one set of notes, so they won't take as long as a full critique group. So now I have to ask.

Do I think I can get them done before the vacation too? Am I up to that challenge? I don't think I am...

But then again...