Sitting here in shock.
Over the weekend, I cleared out all of my e-mails and worked my way through lots of bitty jobs that were niggling away at me. I decided that Monday would be back-to-work day. I'm starting to recover the use of my injured hand. I've used it to help with doing the dishes, I can pick up a cup, and I can just about type again.
I was dead worried about returning to Creeper's. It's been over two months since the accident and I had well and truly lost the plot. I had to read back through the entire thing last week to remind myself what I was writing.
During the read-through, I couldn't help doing a little editing. First I lost 300 words, then I added 600 words, then I lost 800, taking the original MS from 70,000 to around 69,500.
I woke early today, made coffee, and approached my desk with trepidation. It is terrifying returning to a story after such a long absence. Especially one so well developed. This should have been finished weeks ago, and I was worried I wouldn't be able to begin.
One of my greatest concerns was that, at 70,000 words, I couldn't fathom the ending. The plot was moving forward atmospherically, but slowly, and I needed to speed things up, but I wasn't sure how.
Then it came to me.
In the immortal words of Simon Pegg, all I needed to do was skip to the end.
Literally, just cut out five months and split the story into Part I and Part II.
It's a risky strategy. I would have preferred to use a montage if this had been film, but it's done now, and I think it might just have worked.
In fact, I'd like to outline my creative process using a series of Spaced gifs:
Anyway, I'm in shock because - mostly one-handed - I've just completed 2,500 words. It wasn't as difficult as I was expecting. The first 500 words, annoyingly, made up for the count reduction from the edit. So, I crossed the 70,000 word threshold for a second time. But I'm hoping I can keep this up and resume my 10k a week quota. I reckon another 40,000 and this novel's dusted.
I'm back, baby!
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