Revising, Driving

Progressing through CHANT revisions yesterday was a wonderful obsessive-writer event.  I moved through the longest and messiest chapter in the novel and did my best to let the narrator choose what could stay and what needed to be cut.  There was a fair bit of adding as well, and much rewording of bland and awkward phrasings.  This pass of revisions for the first part are complete.  30K words down, 110K to go.

Yesterday was also Dev's first day behind the wheel of a car.  He has driven farm vehicles, but rumbling through a huge open field is a sight different from keeping to your side of a two-lane country road.  There are only two hours of the day when you'll find more than the occasional vehicle on our road--the morning hour for folks going to work or school, and the evening hour for folks coming home--so we did our driving in the middle of the afternoon, after the previous day's ice patches had melted.

He didn't hit anything or anyone.  He (mostly) kept the car between the lines.  Left turns are well done.  Right turns need work.  Braking and acceleration are as expected.  The joyful look on his face when he finally pulled into the driveway on his own was worth every frantic beat of my heart.

Today will be more revising and driving.  I'm sure there's a fantastic way to tie those two together in a neat little package of comparative phrases.  But the bottom line is this: I'm happy and my kid is happy, and it looks like we get to replay that happiness today, tomorrow, and Friday.  Life is good right now.

More writerly thoughts will come sometime later this week.