Photo credit: Junior Moran on Unsplash

I’ve finished. At least, sort of.

Is there still material to write? Yes. Should I have worked on that today? Yes. Did I do it? No. What did I do instead?

Start from the beginning and edit what was already there.

Was this a good idea? Who knows?

To back up a little: last night, I fell into bed by midnight which—for me—is extremely early, but I was exhausted. Except for a few brief occasions when Ned woke me, meowing for food (which he didn’t get), I slept until about 9:30.

I had grand plans for the day. Laundry, housework, bill-paying, minor home repairs, errands—and, of course, writing. Except it didn’t turn out that way.

I probably shouldn’t have started with writing, but I did. I left the laundry basket next to the basement door with all good intentions of taking it down to start a load. The laundry basket is still there. I fed the cats, debating whether I should unload, reload, and run the dishwasher first (when you have a well, water-using tasks are done sequentially, not simultaneously). The unloading and reloading remain to be done. And let’s not talk about the errands or the rest of the housework.

For the first time in days, I brought breakfast and my Surface out to the porch. I knew I needed to work on the new material, but it felt like a great deal of effort. So instead, I started at the beginning to get my mind into the book, and I began to edit. I changed words, clarified language, deleted phrases, and pulled out entire sections to dump in a document I named “stuff to be moved”. I grouped the discretely numbered sections into actual chapters. Interrupted only by a much-needed nap, I paused my editing at p.168, which is more than one-third of the way through the manuscript.

I made progress. But I didn’t make 1,000 new words.

Still, I count today as a success of sorts. I worked on my book for nearly five hours. In a perfect world, someone else would do the laundry and the dishes and the bill-paying and all the rest. Alas, as I’ve said countless times, this is not a perfect world. Tomorrow, I’ll likely have very little time for writing, what with ushering at church, dinner for Mom, and cramming in all the other stuff I was going to do today.

But it’s been fourteen days of writing, and my book is indisputably much farther along than it was two weeks ago. That’s not just a success.

It’s a triumph.

Thanks so much to everybody who came on this journey with me, who liked posts and cheered me on and made me feel as if it mattered to someone else whether I actually did this. You folks are amazing, and I love you all.

Photo credit: Tyler Nix on Unsplash

“What’s next?” you may ask. More of the same, my friends. My plan—which, obviously, did not come to fruition—was to finish the book by the end of June. Fond as I am of deadlines, I’m hesitant to set another one, if only because I hate it when I don’t get there. I have two immensely kind people who have expressed willingness to read and comment, and I wish I could get the book to them by mid-July, but I don’t want to send them something so rough it’s barely worth reading.

Maybe I’ll set myself another fourteen-day challenge, this one aimed at finishing all the new material that needs to be finished and editing what currently exists. It sounds feasible. Starting tomorrow, I could devote a minimum of an hour a day to either creating new text (I know the section I need) or editing what’s here. Two hours a day would be better—one to edit and one to create—but with a full-time job and all the other obligations, that will be pushing it. Let’s say that there will be at least one hour, and if it’s two, so much the better.

Okay, then. Here goes.

Photo credit: Gerd Altmann on Pixabay