Progress Report: The Three-Part Plan

By way of a quick progress report, I've implemented a three-part plan to complete the final draft of my third novel. I love the number three. I always have. I always will.

See? Like that. Three declarative sentences in a row.

Anyway, the first part of the plan is to forge ahead no matter how difficult this red pen stage is, although as I've mentioned earlier, I have broken through to the more inspired and sober parts of this book. And again, I have to report that this stage has been, for lack of a better word, misrepresented on TedTorres.com as being my "favorite" part. I was actually referring to the second part of the plan ...

Which is the inserting of the corrections. This is the part I love due to its certain level of finality. After doing as much as I can of the edits, the second part of my daily regimen is to go back and put chapters in the can, so to speak. This second stage sort of reminds me of the old "Billy Boy" cartoon, where the goat eats up the train tracks, the snake eating its own tail. But it's a productive consumption of track, bringing me all the more closer and quicker to getting the finished manuscript into the right hands.

And some very specific hands are part of the third part of the plan, again happening in conjunction with the first two, and that is to get the finished pages to you (and you know who you are), my invaluable confidant on the outside. In this regard I feel like William S. Burroughs in Tangiers, feeding his finished pages to Ginsberg and Kerouac in New York, telling them that it doesn't matter in what order the pages go, just publish it.

Well, I'm not that liberal with the piece. My OCD won't allow it. I've already written my Naked Lunch.

Behold the power of three!