Mickling along. Actually, rewriting along.

My initial unhappiness over the non-greatness of the old prose wasn't entirely justified. Some parts are stilted and ineffective, but other parts are fine. So rewriting is going faster than I initially feared it would.

There's much more to be done than I had realized, though. I wrote the first part of the novel without all of the plot details ironed out. Later, I pinned various things down and made notes. Now I find quite a few places where hints and foreshadowing and suchlike need to be inserted, which can require some fairly major twiddling with scenes I had written before and thought fixed and final.

But it's all fun. It's a good way to spend a vacation. We'll be off to Baton Rouge for a few days -- Wednesday through Sunday -- but I'm taking my laptop along in hopes of continuing this process while there. Maybe I'll do some of it at Coffee Call, a nifty cafe-au-lait and beignet place there. Well, it used to be nifty when it was mostly filled with studying and coffee-guzzling LSU students, but I wonder if it's now swamped because of the large numbers of people from New Orleans who moved to BR, pretty much permanently, because of Katrina. My father-in-law and his wife say that the traffic is far worse than previously.

Anyway, my original deadline for the novel was completely unrealistic, it's now clear to me. I'm not going to set myself a new one. As long as I'm making reasonably steady progress, I'll be happy. That would be a big change from the few years immediately preceding the starting of this blog.