I May Have Exaggerated.
Fri 2006-02-03 00:00:50 (in context)
- 50,439 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 8.50 hrs. revised
Well, maybe not Hell. Maybe just a little bit of Purgatory. And not so much "breaking loose" as "sidling over surreptitiously and hanging about all evening."
All I got done tonight was rewriting the the rewriting of the very first scene, the opening piece of the framing device in which Grandma Lenner announces that she's going to tell a story. In which all the cousins and one of the parents is introduced. In which all sorts of statements about age and who's whose kid are made, using numbers and names I grabbed out of the air on November 1, 2004.
I do believe I spent forty-five minutes just hammering out a family tree.
How old each person is now... how old each of Diane's daughters were when their father died... how old they were at the time of each grandchild's birth... an explanation of each daughter's love life and why one of them apparently had her first child at age sixteen...
That's a bunch of math. And not the easy sort of math, like checkbooks and restaurant tips. No. The hard sort of math where you have to keep about eight or ten random numbers floating around in your head at all times.
And then there's family tree issues of the rough draft variety, such as why the heck I had two children named Bryne listening to Grandma's story, and whose child she was, and whether Grandma's daughter Sherri actually existed or ought to be conflated with the middle daughter, skeptic Giselle.
And why the hell so many characters in this book have names that start with "D."
My head hurts. I'm going to bed now.