As the deadline for this month approaches, I’m both ahead and behind. I’ve already submitted 35 pages last month, and according to my contract, I only have to submit 20-25 pages every month. The flip side of that, however, is that my entire revised thesis is due 27 September, not 27 October like I originally believed. In order to meet that goal, I needed to revise a chapter a week for 15 weeks, and I haven’t done that these last two weeks. I’m unbelievably far behind and it’s rather frightening. The theory is that as my chapters progress in the novel, my writing also improves which means that I should have less to do in the later chapters.

But I have to make it to those chapters first. I’m still stuck in the early beginning, when my writing was still quite poor and my characters extremely flat. There’s so much work that needs to be done in the beginning to liven things up that I’m not sure I have the energy for that and everything that’s going on outside my life as a writer.

The other part is that I found out today that I’m not really going to have anything due during the month of October, but if my mentor and my second reader decide that my manuscript are not quite worthy, I’ll only have about three weeks to fix everything to their satisfaction. So I guess my October will be spent busy with other things and then the first couple weeks of November have the potential to be amazingly unpleasant. If my second reader is who I think it is, it’s a person who is very good at their craft and I’m slightly intimidated by as a writer. Someone who knows horror and knows it well, as well as being completely immersed in mythology. There might be a lot of holes in my story that will shine out as blatantly obvious and I’m worried.

It’s a lot easier for me to rewrite the entire beginning chapters than it is for me to keep sorting through and attempting to find sections that are even remotely salvageable. The first versions of these chapters really were quite bad and I’m so annoyed with them and my whole story that I sometimes just wish I could be an amazing writer like the authors I can’t ever seem to read enough of. I do know that anything worth doing takes hard work and effort and that’s why I continue to plug away at all of this, even though I don’t feel like I’m a very good writer sometimes.

I still have a couple hours before I need to head off to bed and I’m strongly hoping that I can at least finish this new draft of Chapter 3 before I go to bed tonight. That would help me out a lot. Or maybe I could just stay up all night and keep writing, since I think I’ve found my flow for the moment. Lots and lots of words being typed very quickly in all types of medium – here, emails, the revisions. There appear to be a great many words in my head that are desperate for any escape they can manage.