A few days back (you can read it here) I offered my last update on my latest novel and wrote:

This current draft is a very serious one

It occurs to me this line needs a little explanation.

After all, each time I sit behind my computer and stare into the monitor with whatever current draft of whatever novel I’m currently working on… am I not taking the work seriously?

Yes, yes I am.

But there are times when one is simply fishing around for ideas, where you have a general notion of where you want to go but are searching around for the proper way to get there.

I can’t tell you the number of times I sit in front of that computer and sit there… and sit there…

…and nothing seems to come of it. I may move the proverbial ball a few inches forward -I usually do- but truthfully the end result might be almost negligible and I feel like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill. Yeah, I’ll eventually get there and the boulder rolls back down the hill and I’m back to the start with that new novel, searching for a new and interesting path to take that boulder up that hill.

The current draft of the book is a serious one because I see the path now to the top of this particular hill, where in earlier drafts that path might not have been so terribly well defined.

Or, to put it another way, the novel’s skeleton is complete and I’m moving on from coming up with the story proper and feel like I’m about to move more solidly into the revision phase, where its not so much what I’m presenting, story-wise, but how I’m presenting it.

It will still take time, of course, and I’m not quite there, but the boulder is getting that much closer to the top of the hill.