Next Saturday is an all hands on deck workday; the students land in force. The plan till then: write as much as possible whenever not at work. Beyond that point the odds of a normal workday are unlikely until October.

About thirty pages of serious lifting remain. From there, light edits and a complete ending rewrite.

A quirk — and it’s a good one — about the this stage of the edit process is that for every page cut, a new passage takes its place. Where it comes from, I’m never sure. Many times I’m unaware as the excise, revise, rewrite cycle plays out. I just whack the weakest scene, write a better version, and at the end of the session — somehow, magic maybe — the word count falls at roughly the same mark.