i'm so ready to go home and hoping that blogging will make the next 50 minutes fly by.

i'm trying to make a schedule (that i'll actually keep) for the whole publishing thing. i wanted to have my revisions done by Christmas so i could work diligently on my query, but now i think that i might be a little delayed. i'm burned out (again) and i really don't want to think about words as they fit into the world i've created. i've spent soooooo loooooong cultivating this...behemoth, that i know her too well and yet not as well as i'd like. i know that dima and the rest of the cast will open up to me as the next book unfolds, but i still feel dissatisfied with the whole. some of the parts are good. however, when i think about it, i think it's stagnant and isn't moving anywhere. i'm trying to cover the pitfalls to worshiping science, extending it to people being abducted and used as test subjects, but i just don't know if it really has the depth and heart i want it to have. or maybe i'm just caterwauling about nothing. it seems like one of the curses of the writer is to be eternally dissatisfied...

the overlapping theme of this book is that love can never be truly erased. dima is an amnesiac test subject bent on discovering why she's been mutated, but along the way she develops feelings she can't understand for one of the lead scientists. She fights her feelings until the third-to-last chapter, when she finally realizes that she does love him, even if it's a misguided love. i think that that arc plays itself pretty well, but i'm not sure that i've effectively touched on the horror that dima feels throughout the novel when she meets these other 'freaks' and accidentally sees the captive humans brought in. she lives in a world where anyone she meets, experiment and scientist alike, can disappear from her life without notice. i just don't know if i overplay or underplay her outrage and her fear. *le sigh* i may never get it perfect. i just need to get it as close to right as i can.

fantasy is my first love, and the genre in which i feel i fit better. but this idea has taken over my brain and hasn't let go yet. i feel like i can make something great out of it if i can just get it right. argh. more revisions, i suppose. then there's the whole dream thing that i can't figure out. it seemed really cool at the time to have the panther's memories infiltrate dima's sleep (taking over for the human life she can't remember), but the WORD COUNT! i finally got under 118000 (to about 17999), and that was almost impossible. i still have over half the book left for prelim revisions, and there are parts i know i need to cut or change. maybe by then i'll have the whole dream thing figured out...

half an hour. crap.