Book Update

It's been two months (almost to the day) since I unveiled the existence of my novel-in-progress. For most of those two months, there wasn't a whole lot going on with it as I'd gotten mildly stalled again. The combination of all those March birthdays and anniversaries along with the excitement around taking on Julie's "kids" for 18 days in April put some pretty impressive brakes on my writing, for awhile. In the last week and a half, though, I've gotten back in gear and progress is once again the order of the day.

Today I finished chapter 8. I'm anticipating either 13 or 14 chapters, meaning that I'm firmly past the halfway mark now. A week ago, as I was working on chapter 7, I decided that I needed a "plot chart" to help me keep track of details as well as to see the overall shape of the book's framework. It took me most of last Friday to construct this fairly large hardcopy sheet and fill it in for the first 6 chapters, but ever since then it's been invaluable! I showed it to Julie when she was over on Saturday night and it was pretty obvious that she was impressed. Using it, I was able to sketch out the upcoming chapters at an extremely high level, giving me my first real feeling of confidence as far as how much work was still outstanding.

I'm in a bit of a feedback vacuum at the moment, though, as Julie has chapters 6 & 7 but hasn't read them yet (what's up with people letting jobs interfere with their home lives, anyway??). I don't know whether to give her chapter 8 now or wait until she's gotten through the other two before handing it over. Worryingly, since the last 3 chapters represent more than 40% of the book so far, it's entirely possible I've gone completely off the rails and just don't know it yet because Julie's almost 60 pages behind in her reading! Hopefully that's not the case, but it's definitely a concern...