Someday I Wanna Be Dignified and Old

It's done. I went above and beyond my cutting goals, mainly because there was so much excess verbiage (I would have given you examples, Greg, but they were too damned embarrassing). I ended up cutting about 10,000 words and 40 pages, and this despite adding a couple of needed scenelets and one pretentious allusion. So the monster is on its way to agent-land, which is good because I need to not look at it for a little while.

For those of you keeping score at home, that means I have 1, 4, and 9 of the items on my to-do list accomplished, and several more in progress. I doubt I'll finish War and Peace (7) before the semester starts, but I'm about 500 pages in. (I'm liking it: duels! Freemasons! Subtle social satire! Napoleon!) This week is for finishing up 2, 3, 5, 6, and 10. 8 is more of a lifetime sort of goal, one that I hope you will all help me out with . . .

I'm having thoughts about this novel-thing, related in part to this post by Jay Lake, but only time will tell if those thoughts will coalesce into anything approaching an actual post.