Three Pleasant Surprises

The first two pleasant surprises are for you. The third one is mine.

Since you’ve stopped by to visit, we’ll talk about you.

FIRST, this is not a blog post about the holiday season. By this point, most people are over it. This blog post is over it.

SECOND, this is not a blog post about New Year’s Resolutions. I will not bore you with the, “I need to change my life in thirty six different ways. This will start in January 1^st and go through the end of my days.”  Whatever.

So THIRD (I’m pretty happy about this) I’ll tell you about my pleasant surprise.

The cool bit is that I both caused and received this surprise.

How’s that for awesome? Hmmm?

(I must note here that I didn’t do it on purpose, nor did I set this up.)

A few months ago, a writing buddy and I did a retreat up in Park City for three days.  We wrote, she barely let me eat, and I typed just over 30,000 words on my manuscript—finishing the story for the rough draft of my second book of New Sight.

I rejoiced. I may have done the dance of joy (you’ll never know). It was awesome.

Once I got home I realized that I had to go back and completely re-vamp chapters four through twelve. So I spent a few weeks doing that. Just last week I hit the spot where I got to do more editing than creating. The groove kicked in, and I blew through about ten chapters in a couple of days. Yay!

Now I’m poised at the edge of the last quarter of the novel. I’ve fixed the beginning, edited the middle and eyed the ending with suspicion.

You see, the last 30,000 words is what I wrote in Park City. I hadn’t read it since. I hardly remembered what I wrote because we wrote so much over that weekend.

Yesterday I hit the end of my editing. I had to read the last 50 pages to see how much, if any, of it I could use. My hunch was that I would have to re-write most of it.

A good workout as well as about ten minutes of talking myself into it came before I sat down at the computer and started to read.

The first chapter was really good. The second was okay. The third worked like a charm…and this kept going.  All the way through the end. I can use almost all of it! It makes sense, and some of it is even well-written.

Go me!

And that, after the month of chaos that we call December, was a most welcome and a very pleasant surprise.

What about everyone else? Anything jump out and surprise you in a good way over the last week or so? We could all use some encouragement right now, I think. So share!