Progress Report: The Art of Brooding

It's funny how some days Facebook and Twitter are more compelling than my WIP (that's "work in progress," for my non-writerly Dear Readers). I've been having a lot of those days lately. Also, this is still weighing on my mind like you wouldn't believe. (Cap the damn well already! Seriously! Make an effort, at least! Duct tape, BP -- anything will do!)

Look at this f****** Regency lord. He'll brood the s*** out of your moors. 

(pic and comment via Cleolinda's Tumblr) (I find the juxtaposition of classical

objects and crude modern language hysterical. HM calls it my "historical Beavis 

and Butthead tendency." I think he's right, because this whole Regency 

lord bit made me giggle for half an hour. Also, mmm...brooding Regency lord. Delicious.)

Ripping the 30,000-word subplot from my novel took a great gust of wind from my sails. The task of rifling through my dead subplotty scenes for essential plot points to re-incorporating elsewhere has been tedious, frankly. I don't want to re-incorporate these plot points. I liked how they were incorporated before, thankyouverymuch. But I can't deny the necessity of the cut, in deference to the publishing gods and their hesitance to print anything over 125,000 words.

From the brilliant "Hark, a vagrant" by K. Beaton.

All right, Dear Reader, I'm done brooding. I swear. I'm buckling down and plowing through the end of the manuscript this week. Then I'll re-do one final editing pass, the "read it aloud" method, to make sure my plot fricassee is still comprehensible. Also up this week: titling. And a happy-go-lucky blog post sometime soon, because I think we could all use one of those.