Words: 1966 revising “Adventures in Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 36th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through about 7 1/2 pages of double-spaced text. So much tonight! There was a lot of skipping over whole paragraphs and resolving questions quickly. Being the one who wrote the original book, it makes me happy when a lot of my sentences are left alone. It means I did something right! (Okay, so I don’t mean to imply that the book as a whole needed a ton of revision, but we tend to get stuck on some areas, and we didn’t do that much tonight.)

Also, a breakthrough in the lack of a real title happened, and it was much simpler than I was making it. I have spent so much time looking for some great title that would sum up the expansiveness of this book, or that would philosophically show Missy’s journey, and nothing was clicking. Everything sounded too pompous or vague or just wrong. I brought up that issue tonight, and one sister threw out some ideas she’s had. They were all much simpler than the directions I’ve been going, and one of them was simply “Pithea.” I’ve thought of that before, but worried it’d be too vague as well, because no one will know what Pithea is (it’s the country in which my book is set). However, I think it makes a lot of sense to call it that, because this book is in many ways an introduction to Pithea. Thus, from this point forward, this book will be known as “Pithea.”

Words: 1300 revising “Adventures in Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 34th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through just over 4 pages of double-spaced text. Lots of new description was added, and we discussed the difference between “color” and “tint.”

Words: 1832 revising “Adventures in Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 32nd meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through almost 6 pages of double-spaced text. We’re really flying now, falling back into that groove we’d found before Christmas when we had to stop for a few weeks. Our longest discussion was probably on what type of material would work as a mortar when grinding herbs, and what would be problematic. In the end we threw all of that out and went with a concave rock.

We have our third in-person, all-day marathon meeting coming up this weekend, so hopefully we’ll make some major progress then too. We have plans to set up a base camp with figurines so we can see how a particular scene works out. It should be lots of fun!

Words: 1959 revising “Adventures in Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 31st meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through just over 6 1/2 pages of double-spaced text. We were skipping whole paragraphs of text that no one had any issues with. And we spent some time near the beginning discussing compasses pre-technology. So it was definitely a good meeting, and that’s considering my head was not in it at the beginning at all.

Words: 1578 revising “Adventures in Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 30th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through just over 5 full pages of double-spaced text. We were all very excited at how far we made it today. I don’t know why it worked out that way, as I can’t even say we didn’t still get stuck on some stuff, but whatever the reason, it was great.

Words: 726 revising “Adventures in Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 29th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through a little more than 2 full pages of double-spaced text. We felt like we didn’t do much, but we spent a lot of time on the mechanics of a particular element in my fictional world. We’re still working out some issues.

Words: 500 (in the form of 30 minutes) revising “Adventures in Pithea.” I mostly worked on reading and responding to notes made by one of the members of the TCSTB on our shared document. I also spent some time working on world-building, by answering random questions also posed by the same member of the TCSTB, as she’s trying to get a better handle on the fantasy world I’m creating as I go.

I’m hitting that slump that happens every few months where it’s difficult to get into the real revision. I know it won’t last forever, but I’m still disappointed in my laziness.

Words: 811 revising “Adventures in Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 28th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through a little more than 2 full pages of double-spaced text. It was less than we’ve done the last few weeks, but we had some fixes to make that required going back a bit to clarify some things in previous text. We also inserted a new item usable for hand-to-hand combat and had to introduce it right. So the word count isn’t really an accurate reflection of how much work we did.