Draft two is DONE! I managed to trim 
about 5,000 words in the process, despite adding a new chapter in the middle, so that’s a good sign. I will need to print this puppy up to be able to read and edit for the revision stage and I’m planning on doing some significant research reading before diving in to make sure I’ve got historical and cultural details right. I just placed a library hold request on seventeen books, have seven more that the library has in ebook format that I’ll read along the way, plus ordered a bunch more that neither the Oak Park nor Chicago libraries have to fill out the rest of my research needs. A trio of books sitting on my to-read pile are also migrating to my being-read pile. Then there are the survivor testimonies I’ve found on the Yad Vashem website that I need to translate and find the useful details. I’m not sure that I’ll be getting into actual editing until maybe November or so, depending on how long these books and other materials take to read.
The new story made it to an unsatisfactory conclusion and re-reading what I’ve cobbled together over the last nine months has turned up a better sense of the middle that might get me to a valid ending.
Progress on story revision still slow.
with the novel. I missed writing a few days and had a few days of very low word counts, but for the last week and a half, I’ve made a point of advancing at least two pages a day through the printed first draft manuscript in the revision process which has helped me move along at a decent pace. I’ve set a goal of finishing this draft by the end of July so that when I go on vacation in August, I can leave my laptop behind.
for this month’s poor progress on the novel other than life intervening. In theory, I can finish this rewrite still by the end of June, but I suspect it will be July when it happens. Once that’s done, I end up diving into some heavy-duty research to make sure that I can fill in details and fix errors in the text
stops called “Stalingrad,” a fact I found fascinating, especially since the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in the wave of de-Stalinization under Nikita Krushchev. On my last visit to Paris, I decided I had to see what was at the stop with this name so one evening while my pregnant wife convalesced in our AirBnB I headed out to the 19ᵉ arrondissement to see for myself.
This time the odd shapes are because I added a new chapter to the book (and life intervened a bit more than usual). I got a bit stuck on the new chapter since I wanted it to be about more than the chapter title and historical event that I was relating and I needed to figure out how it affected the characters and the story. I still have to do a revision round on the chapter, but it’s overall in a good place.
whole story. My graph looks like for about a third of the month I didn’t make much progress but in fact, even though my word count didn’t move around much (and even dropped a bit), that was a result of wrestling with a troublesome passage in the first draft and making it much better on the rewrite. I feel a bit like the flat bits on the graph show more work happening than the steep slopes.