I'm getting to the business end of my novel.

Excuse me while I take a moment to squee about that. I've been writing this sucker for five years. Discipline is pretty much a strange beast to me; I'm feeling good about being so close, and about my general productivity this year.

Of course, this is just the rough draft. It's going to require what I've been referring to as "major surgery" - there are plotholes, alterations made as I went that I didn't bother to go back and fix, foreshadowing to be done, double-ups to be smoothed out... in general, a lot of notes along the lines of: [fix this, Evans!]

I send my chapters to my mother when they're done. If anyone tried to read the last two-thirds of the novel as it currently is, I'd disembowel them with my fingernails (it is not ready to be read, for the reasons stated above), but sending it to Mum has actually been a great motivational prompt. Letting myself down is no big deal (I have no respect for myself) but the notion of letting someone else down gives me a kick.

I've withheld the last three chapters (46 thru 48) though, because it was really one movement of narrative in three parts, and I suspected I'd need to alter earlier bits before I could finish off the movement. Now that I've finished 48, it's time to send them all off, but I made the classic blunder of getting involved in a land war in Asia deciding to read through the three before I sent them to Mum.

Possibly a mistake. These three chapters are the novel in miniature - re-reading chapter 46 I've found: two conversations that I repeat in chapter 48, coming to a completely different conclusion each time; the answer to a question I ask in chapter 47; and a whole page of narrative where they run around in circles before returning to exactly the same point.

This is three chapters. There are going to be fifty of the fuckers in the finished book.

And yet, mammoth and nightmarish as the concept of rewriting suddenly looks, I find myself filled with zeal for it. Five years of writing is behind me. Editing is FUN. Editing is what I do. Taking things apart and putting them back together in a better way is a challenge and a joy.

Bring it on.

My pants are cursed.

The most annoying thing about today is that I can't call it a bad day, because nothing went wrong with the painting, we won the cricket and I wrote 3000 words.

Annoying.