i will keep writing until someone reads me!

and then i'll stop. but until then...

i think i'm having a day like lisa and laura over at www.lisalaura.blogspot.com. the weather outside truly is frightful, and even though i've lived in the midwest for six or seven years, i never get used to the wind up here! i'm from Appalachia, where there are mountains that block this stuff out. and today, wind gusts of up to 60 mph. *hangs head* northern ky/ohio needs mountains.

anyway, the whole editing thing isn't working so far. turns out i'd missed an entire section in the rewrites that had to be added in. so i'm still over 118,000 words. but i'm just through the first seven chapters (i think), so i have 28 left to go... i wrote way too much. and to think, i was worried about making length.

thinking that next week i'll start on query letters while at work. take all the "selling yourself" advice i've looked at online and go for the gold. i just know that if i can't get this monster pared down toward 100,000 words, i'm not going to have much luck. so after preliminary revisions are done, i'm going to have to see if there are any sections i don't need, or chapters that don't push the story forward. i'm also debating the dreams, but those serve foreshadowing purposes (at least in my brain), so i don't know. just because i like those sections doesn't mean that anyone else will.

there are also a few fight sections i'm considering rewriting. having the panther take center stage works well in my head, but it doesn't flow as well on paper i've been told. i'm trying to show the rift between dima's human side and her panther side by having the two sides be in charge of different things. the panther takes care of hunting and climbing and panthery stuff while the human side thinks and reasons and does humany stuff. but keeping that in first person would cut out a lot of words. well, not a lot, but a possibly significant amount. what's a girl to do?