Busy yesterday, so not much progress book-wise. However, I made more progress than I thought because I was able to lift a fair amount from my rough draft. I knew that thing would be good for something.

It looks like I have 130 quotes culled from the rough draft for my blog. That will keep me set for a good long time. It looks like about half come from one character which isn't really a surprise.

I made some good progress during the weekend. I'm now working on revised chapter 8. At this point in the story the rough draft had 23,471 words. The revised version has about 15,000 words. That's some serious cutting down.

I'm now working on revised chapter 8 and 9. My wife had an idea for chapter 8 and I'm playing around it with, so 8 is still in flux even as I have started on 9.

Chapter 9 is going to be a bit on the slow side. There's a bit to clean up from chapter 8 and some character development. So stuff happens, but perhaps the slowest chapter so far.

I got an update from home on my son's activity.

He's hard at work on his book. He just came to ask me about which animals would be good for being his protagonist's "arch enemy." I believe he's settled on a dog.

I got done with chapter 8 in my revision. That's a bit of a milestone since I consider that to be the end of the opening part of the book. In the draft the chapter ended a bit later, but I moved up the ending for better drama. Nonetheless close enough for me to call it a milestone.

Now for an area of the book that will probably need some cutting down.

Last night, I went back and did some revision on chapter 1 after blogging that I decided to press head to chapter 9. I ended up make more changes than I though.

One thing though, I'm having trouble coming up with a physical beat that suggests annoyance or maybe disapproval (not disgust). I just have a frown right now for annoyance.

Could he spit, click his teeth, slam his hand down on something? (how annoyed is he?)

Slamming something is a good beat. There's nothing for him to slam, but doing something with excess force would probably work. He's fairly annoyed, it's a turf dispute between two different organizations on the same side.

I'm starting to feel much better about doing the book alone. Relieved, actually. It's a lot of work, but it's mine, and I like depending on me, even if it means if it fails to find a publisher, it's all me.