Distracted by Editing

Today I was going to work on my screenplay, but I got distracted by editing book one of my romance trilogy. I also went grocery shopping, but that's not very interesting.

I've been pushing for forward writing motion for so long now, telling myself that once I get book two written I'd go back and start the editing process on book one. But I joined this awesome online critique group, Critique This, and I've been sending chapters of book one for them to critique, which has forced me to go back and reread book one a chapter at a time. Today, however, I've reread several chapters and I find that I'm quite surprised.

They say that once you finish writing something you should put it aside for a while before you go back to it. As it turns out, my mission for forward motion in book two has been so intense that I've completely forgotten some of the story I wrote in book one! Anybody else every do that? I've written so many words, pages, chapters that I'm not surprised I can't remember some of it. I clearly need to sit down and keep a list of threads that need to be continued throughout the trilogy...stuff like some of my characters' personality traits, some backstory I'd seeded early on, that kind of stuff.

The thing that makes me happiest is that so far on this read-through, the story is hanging together pretty well. Of course it still needs lots of work and polish, and thanks to my awesome crit group I'm getting lots of suggestions how to do that. But at least it reads fairly well and hasn't fallen apart yet. I'll reserve final judgement until the crit group has read the whole thing and I can get started on the nitty gritty of revisions and editing.

In the meantime, however, I really do need to finish the first draft of book two. I'm very, very close to being done. I just need to finish the climactic battle, reunite the main characters, and set up book three....so a handful of chapters at most.

Tomorrow, though, I really do need to gets some pages done on the screenplay before I do any other writing. I made a promise to my mentor I'd send him 5 pages per week, so tomorrow's the day I need to pony up this week's 5 pages.