Juggling words

I'm still deep into revising my novel and it's hard slogging. One issue is I have too many similar days, so I've been combining a bunch of them.

At one point I worried I'd made my main characters too perfect and threw in a fight. I've spent ages trying to make this fight sound like two people who simply got frustrated and snapped at each other. But, instead they sound like bad actors following a script. Walk in, fight, and walk off. So now I'm scrapping that whole section. Which means the tail end of that section, where they flip through the baby name book and choose names, has to get shuffled to another part of the novel. That's what I'm doing now; rewriting an entire conversation to fit a discussion on baby names.

That part has the main characters hanging out with a friend of theirs named Darcy. I figured it would be appropriate for Darcy to give some baby naming advice, that begins and ends with "don't name your baby after someone famous because he or she will never hear the end of it". The thing is, while I know there's a character named Darcy in a famous old book, I can't remember which old book. I really love Google, I don't know how many times it's kept me from looking like a complete idiot. And I'm sure it'll step up adequately again. Thank you Google! "Darcy character novel" brought up Pride and Prejudice. So I'll be doing a bit of online reading. Maybe I'll have Jessica read the zombie novelization of the book, she reads a lot.

I feel like my novel is going the same direction as my diet. Each time I think I've cut out a page, it comes back. I don't have nearly as many pages as I did when I typed my last sentence and thought "there... that's done" but for all the editing I'm doing, I keep finding myself constantly hovering around 444 to 447 pages.

I wanted to head out for a walk today but my son's making a working elevator out of lego and I figured this is a good time to write. Hopefully I'll get across the street for a walk after dinner.

And I'm back to writing again...