Happy belated Persian New Year to all! :)

Very often it’s after I’ve declared a section “done” that I start getting the flood of ideas I wish I’d gotten when I was first drafting the thing. “Hey, wouldn’t it be better if [x] happened instead?!” Yes, yes it would. I usually go back and make those changes immediately, especially if they precipitate changes that will carry forward through the rest of the manuscript. I also make sure to correct any and all inconsistencies I find before returning to normal drafting.

Lots of writing advice says you should never go back, just plow ahead until you have a finished (and seriously flawed) draft, but that doesn’t work for me. I simply cannot move forward knowing there are huge unresolved plot-holes somewhere behind.

You might wonder: have I ever made these sorts of mid-stream edits and later regretted it? I would have to say, almost never. For writing, I use a software program called Scrivener, which has a “snapshot” feature. I can capture a version of any scene before I make major changes to it, and revert to the previous version at any time, if necessary. Even though I’ve taken hundreds of snapshots throughout the years, I’ve only skimmed through them a few times, and that was usually to pull out phrasing/dialogue that I wanted to use elsewhere in the manuscript. I honestly can’t remember a time when I’ve ever reverted a scene to an older version wholesale. So when I backtrack, it may not feel like progress, but it’s almost never time wasted.

Writing Updates

As you can probably tell by now, I did a teensy bit of backtracking this month on the draft of Book 3, but the manuscript is that much stronger for it. I got halfway into Chapter 13, and am now around 61,000 words. I’m thinking I can wrap things up somewhere between the 80-100K mark. That will mean that half of what I originally intended for Book 3 will be Book 4 instead! LOL That’s exactly what happened with the first two books. I tend to assume I can fit WAY more stuff into one book than is realistic.

Current Goals

Well-rounded Latin practice. I continue to study on my own, and our Latin speaking group is expanding to include new people. Since they’re even less practiced than I am (!), that means we’re using English by default now, and rehearsing the most basic sentences imaginable. It feels like a step backward, but I’ll be patient for a few more weeks and see what happens. I’m hoping we get back up to 99% Latin for our discussions.

Being a good Stoic. The past few weeks, I got serious about purging things in my house that I haven’t actually been using and hardly even remember I owned. A lot of it had sentimental value, and other things were more wishfully held onto (“I’ll get back into that hobby someday!”). I’m donating and recycling as much of it as possible. It’s a big weight off my shoulders to free myself of these obligations, and it has the added benefit of clearing out the attic. We’ll be able to re-insulate up there and bring down our energy costs.

Listening to German. I didn’t do as much German practice as I hoped this month, but there’s always next month. Also, by coincidence, a lot of the people in the Latin group happen to speak German in some capacity. Maybe if we can’t figure out how to say something in Latin, we can fall back to saying it in German instead? I’ll have to see what the others think of that idea.

Civic engagement. I’ll be helping out at voter registration events in April and May. I really hope that one day this becomes moot if/when automatic voter registration is enacted, but in the meantime, I’m gonna register everyone I can!

I will also be traveling to upstate New York at the end of next month, so my next post may be delayed a bit. Regardless, I hope you have a great month! :)