After a weekend of editing and attempting to create a semblance of order in my yard, I managed to edit a little over five chapters and plant almost all of the plants I bought the first week of May! 🙂

My biggest struggle of the weekend was one pesky scene that took hours to get right. Hours! I just took a look at it this morning and can’t remember why it took so long… It seems like a small, simple scene. But that illustrates a point that I remind myself of when I’m frustrated with a section: the reader will never know how bad the first draft of a scene is, nor how much time you spent on it, nor how many times you got exasperated and had to take a break to pull some of the endless supply of weeds in your garden. The reader will see the final scene, and won’t have any idea that you went through such turmoil unless you post about it on your blog.

This particular scene was one of the few scenes that needed a lot of work in the original draft, but which I’d left to work on later. It contained lot of references to something I’d decided to remove completely, so I had to take those out without disrupting the flow of the story. There were a few things that needed to be cleared up with the choreography, and I added in a few small references to tie in the character’s emotion to the previous scene because it would still be on her mind. It feels a lot better! And since I’m an optimist, instead of dwelling on the fact that I spent so much time on what is currently a 1500-word scene, I’m thrilled that it was the only scene I worked on over the weekend that required that much work. 🙂

The other thing I’ve been working on lately is the Fantasy in the City bundle that launches a week from today! I’m really, really excited about this bundle. It’s the first one I’ve ever been in, which is pretty exciting, but putting it together (since I’m the organizer) has turned out to be a lot more fun than I would have expected. Plus it’s super cool to look at the not-yet-live page on the BundleRabbit website and see all twenty short story covers together. There are some fantastic stories that I can’t wait to read myself!

And because I’m a multitasker, I’ve started to think about the novella I’ll get back to as soon as I hand the novel over to my editor, as well as what types of things I might write for the writing class I’m taking in the fall. In that class I’ll be focusing on historical fiction. I’m hoping the class will help me figure out more about an idea I have for a series set in the American West in the late 1800s. I have at least two of the side stories worked out, and I have three main characters I love – or are they all main characters? I’m not yet sure. So this summer I’m doing research on the time period, which will hopefully help me get my head in the right place for this class. And yes, it is kind of funny to be working on fantasy stories while thinking about Westerns!