Peach juice and other things

So I just dripped peach juice down the front of my shirt. I think I'd be more upset about it if that peach hadn't been so delectable. I've been on a bit of a peach kick lately, i think because it's summer. I even bought some peach scented lotion and body spray last week. It smells exactly like the peach ice cream I used to make with my family at the beach.

What does this have to do with my writing you ask? Absolutely nothing.

Sadly I have little news to report in the writing department. I haven't written so much as a sentence since Wednesday night and even then I only added about 600 words. I have, however, become even more of a Brandon Sanderson fangirl this past week. Which is funny because I still have yet to fully finish any of his novels. I skimmed the last third of Elantris and I'm still slowly reading Mistborn: The Final Empire.

He's been posting a free e-book on his website and I hadn't really looked at it until this weekend. He does something *super* cool here, not only is he posting a free book of his but he has been posting each draft version. Which means you can compare (using the MS word compare function) version 4 with version 5 and see exactly what line edits his editor asked him to make. I took a brief glance at version 1 and compared it with version 5 for fun. It's like night and day difference, red lines everywhere. It gives us aspiring authors a realistic view of what fiction looks like in the humble beginnings, even for published authors. He also has some really great columns on his website that made me seriously want to be his best friend. Especially the one on The DaVinci Code.

Okay so now that I've embarrassed myself with my fangirl tendencies I'll move onto a different topic. So I'm planning on finishing the "new" chapter 3 this weekend. I really want to have moved on from this beginning by the time I go out of town Tuesday. Since my reorganization of the beginning the rest of the book has fallen neatly into place and I feel tons better about where the book was going. It's interesting how sometimes you have to go back to the beginning to fix problems that happen much much later. I'm not at all remotely interested in editing the original first several chapters anytime soon. Frankly that will be a huge task, one that I'm not looking forward to at all. I think i might just end up rewriting chapter 4 which was the original chapters 1-3 that i have since smooshed into one. It's not (too) terrible but it no longer fits with how I've changed things. Anyway I'm not going to bother doing that for awhile, just thinking about editing my extra moody Rafe chapter(s) makes me cringe.

Once chapter 3 is finished I will move back to where I left off at chapter 16. It's kind of nice to have 16 chapters fully completed (if in need of heavy, heavy editing). After that it should be smooth sailing as far as plotting goes. Assuming the writing goes smoothly I hope, I just might see the end of this book before the end of the decade. After that? Who knows. I'll think about it when I get there.