Finishing a novel and handing it off to my Beta Readers always makes me feel both nonplussed — am I really done? I forgot something, I’m sure I did — and at loose ends. I wander about my place, wondering what I’m supposed to be doing. Sometimes my pocket calendar is insistent enough to point out all the tasks that have piled up and are waiting for me; most of the time, I ignore it and flop about from kitchen table to computer to TV and back again, doing a lot of staring and mindlessly turning on and off of iPad. Bejeweled Blitz took up a little bit of time — until I got fed up with my really, really low scores. Really, where are those exploding gems?!!!
Anywhoo, yesterday I went through the dialogue of three of the main characters, sticking with one character at a time and not listening to the radio or reading during breaks so as not to lose their “voice” in my head. Today, I wrapped up some vocab consistency chores — it boggles my mind how authors of old ensured consistency in futuristic or accented dialogue with no search and replace feature in their pens or typewriters to do things like removing every “me” in certain dialogue. I also stumbled across a couple of details I’d begun and never finished. Was it serendipity that Ctrl-F for “me” landed me next to the first one? And the second one? I finally added a line that dropped into my head the other day, cleaned up a thread, and converted the whole thing to PDF. My part is done. What shall I do with myself? Oh yeah, update my website.
