I was starting to think the button band was going to take forever.

I started the sweater back in December, and the button band-slash-collar took me about a week. Insane, right?

Now I just need to pick a button. These are just a few of the ones in my button collection. Some, you’ve seen before. And yes, I actually do have a favorite from these.

Oh, and my Chuck contest? I’m working on picking the winner, and was all set to go, but my printer won’t print out the list of entrants. I don’t really want to write them all out just to be able to pick the winner. I could just assign a number to each one and use a random number generator, but where’s the fun in that? Though, honestly, that’s probably what I’m going to do. Just not right this minute.

Right now? Back to work on my book. I’ve got all my plot holes plugged. I drew an Excel sheet with a row for each character, a column for each day and plotted out everything I had happening, and made sure that, character-for-character, I wasn’t missing anything (too) obvious. Because I knew I was missing some things, and was afraid of dropping others … or of things happening too soon/too late … it was easier at this point just to plot the whole thing out. (“Oh, okay, I need a scene that explains why the reporter knows what Adam wrote in his school essay.” “What if his classmates gave him a gift that proved that he had friends and really was happy in that school? Then, how do I make sure the lawyers know about it?” Stuff like that.)

Then I went back and moved some chapters around and added a few so that the holes weren’t so ankle-twisting for the readers.

So, I’m kind of calling it Second Draft now, and it clocks in at 93,696 words.

Next step–reading through the whole thing again, this time watching for continuity errors, grammar-and-spelling type things, and filling in some of the details for some of the newer chapters that are, at the moment, mostly dialogue. I love writing dialogue, but sometimes forget to have my characters DOING things while they’re talking!

Tags: Finished Knitting, General, Knitting/Spinning // 4 Comments »