YAWP!

Just finished revising the Two Chapters That Nearly Killed Me (Again). I printed these out to take with me to Italy (yes, at the end of June), and it took me until tonight to squodge them into a shape I'm happy with. That's three months¹ for about fifty pages, which I ended up chopping into four chapters instead of two. This took all summer the first time I wrote it, in 2007 — I was hoping, apparently in vain, that revisions would be faster. But now all the bits amble towards the big climax at the end of the first third of the book, the way they're supposed to, and I'm finally happy with the pace of what I used to think of as the "bogged down" stretch, and the glaring plot impossibilities are reconciled, and I can put these chapters out of my mind for months and months. Whee!

Unrelatedly (and less cheerfully), my bike is out of commission for the forseeable future. The rear drop-outs and/or triangle are bent, so the wheel rubs against the frame, as I figured out about half a mile from home this morning. This may be the end of ol' Hoss.

¹Okay, there were three or four vacation-weeks in there.