Writing update

Note to self: rewrites always take longer than you think.This past week, I finally pulled out the first chapter of my novelette, "For the Love of Trees." I recalled that I had pretty well revised it based on comments I received two years ago at TNEO, so I thought it would just need a read-through and a few tweaks before I sent it off to my writing group. Wrong. While I had extensively revised parts, I had other parts where I had just left notes for myself in square brackets about what I wanted to do, for instance, [make protagonist feel much more uncomfortable in this scene] or [dramatize, don't recapitulate, conversation with brother].So I spent some amount of time working all of this out. I'd still like to do some tweaking, but I accomplished most of what I intended to do. I'll wait to see what suggestions I get back from the critiques before deciding where to go next.Then, I realized that the deadline for my second submission for TNEO was approaching. "No problem," I had told myself. I had already planned to submit my story, "The Golden Larynx," which had been critiqued by my group in an early and rather rushed draft, and needed some fixes and some expanding. Then I thought about it and realized it probably was going to end up twice as long. No big deal, since the original draft was only 2,000 words and my writing group members agreed it felt rushed. The concept of the ending was right, but not the timing, and some things needed further development.I worked on this for at least four hours today, not even counting a lot of brainstorming I did this morning, and am still not quite to the end. But it's now 3,655 words and has a couple of scenes left to write, in addition to places where I need to fill in and tweak.Now why do I constantly delude myself thinking that I've got something basically written and can do some fixes when it really needs hours of work? Maybe that's just an excuse to procrastinate. Well, thank goodness for deadlines to force myself to get my butt in the chair.ETA: But at least my third submission for TNEO won't need much work, just a few little tweaks. No, really! *G*