Words/Time: 20 minutes revising “Pithea.” Responding to notes made on the TCSTB shared document by the other members, in anticipation of our marathon meeting coming up tomorrow. That means 12 hours of comparing notes on the story, acting out events or scenes to make sure they’re as realistic as we can, and generally having a blast.

Words/Time: 30 minutes revising “Pithea.” Responding to notes made on the TCSTB shared document by one of the other members, in anticipation of our marathon meeting coming up on Saturday.

And I just want to say that, while I didn’t post any work yesterday, because I didn’t do any, it was not just a missed day. It was one of those deliberate ones, where I knew pretty early in the day I wouldn’t have time, and gave myself that leeway. I haven’t missed many in the last few weeks, so I didn’t feel the need to push. Plus, my husband and I went to a funeral yesterday and ended up hanging out with family until late. But I don’t post on days off, even if they are intentional days off, so I just felt I should mention that here.

Words: 500 (in the form of 15 minutes). I have a massive headache, so I took the chance to do just a small amount of work that didn’t require too much thinking. My Skype revision group is planning to go back soon to work on some exposition parts we’d skipped before. I had some updated notes on those sections that needed putting into our shared file, so I did that. Now I have to go lay down and keep my brain from oozing out of my skull.

Words: 2274 revising “Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 40th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through a little over 7 pages of double-spaced text. We probably spent most of our time discussing how someone would carry an unconscious person a long distance. The most realistic answer wasn’t the one I’d been imagining for years, so it took me some time to come around. We added a scene to act out to our list of things to do at our next marathon meeting.

Words: 2104 revising “Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 39th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through about 6 1/2 pages of double-spaced text. That’s definitely on the higher end. At one point, it was noted that we had gone through a lot of pages without being slowed down by anything. Shortly after that, we did end up spending a lot of time on something we couldn’t see eye-to-eye on. Still, I’m happy with the end result. Right near the end, we came across an issue that could have really screwed up some parts of the story that I really like. We have a solution that should work, but I will have to do some rewriting to fix those parts.

Words: 1978 revising “Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 37th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through about 7 1/4 pages of double-spaced text. A good chunk again! We lost almost an hour of working time at the beginning of the meeting, too, so that means we really flew tonight. I’m trying not to think about how much we would have gotten through if we’d had that hour at the beginning.

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.”