jere7my | Slow down, Palace!

I finished The Slow Palace, I guess on Good Friday. It's about 145,000 words — 2,000 words shorter than the last draft (was hoping to cut ~8,000), and about 10,000 words shorter than The Two Towers, for reference. "Finished" is a relative term; I still need to:

read through my 2½ Moleskines of notes on the book, looking for bits of historical color I never used but could still stick somewhere;
incorporate adfamiliares's suggestions (at least the ones I agree with), which will involve adding a scene or two and reworking at least one chapter;
write a ~15-page summary of the book, which will be the "outline" part of the "sample + outline" I will send to agents / publishers;
give the first three chapters another polish (these 50 pages are the "sample" part);
convert the book to manuscript format; and
draw up a list of agents to write to.

But, in my mind, I am no longer "writing a book" or "revising a book"; I am "preparing a manuscript for submission." I'm Wile E. Coyote after having run off a cliff: my legs are still going like crazy, but I need to change direction suddenly. For the past *mumble* years, I've always had productive work I could pour unlimited creative hours into; now I have these weird stretches of unassigned time. I have to a) convince myself that the busywork in the above list still counts as "writing hours", and thus can be applied to my "worthwhile person" quota, and b) find another book to write. A less complicated book, if I am capable of that. I want to write some shorts first, to see if I can apply some of what I learned while writing The Slow Palace to something with a more immediate reward attached to it. :)

Anyway, I have a book. Moving on.