Stuck in the middle...

This must sound like a never-ending tale of woe, what with Word Nerd writing another post about how she's still editing the middle of her manuscript.

But she still is. And right now, it may be manuscript 0, Word Nerd 1.

Yesterday, she spent a good 90 minutes working on 5 pages. 5. That's 18 minutes a page. That seems like a lot when sometimes she can work through an entire chapter in less than 90 minutes.

This chapter -- chapter 16, to be precise -- needs the serious work. Hopefully, the time spent is making it better. Word Nerd reworked most of the beginning of the chapter and is going to go back to it tonight to finish it off and make sure the whole thing works. Last night, she got rid of one huge info dump and hopefully punched up the level of conflict throughout the scene, hinting at part of the protagonist's past that should help the reader understand her a little better.

The word count fluctuator changes slightly, but keeps hovering between 126,000-127,000 words. Right now, Word Nerd's hoping to keep the story under 130K, though if it needs more, it'll get more.