Update on Eden

My novel-in-progress, Eden, is still approaching the first-rewrite stage. The holdup is that I wrote the first draft in longhand, primarily during the last two rounds of NaNoWriMo. And since I can't possibly imagine doing revisions in longhand, I'm in the process of transcribing the 240 handwritten pages. My secretarial skills are clearly not up to the task (apologies to Mr. Whale, my high school typing teacher), and I've only finished 75 pages so far.

Even at this early stage, I can already see some pretty significant revisions which need to be made, primarily related to historical facts which I didn't learn until long after the related passages were written. And those revisions don't even include the ones which will inevitably arise after I finally get around to reading several history books (Mark Holloway's Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America 1680-1880, Charles Boewe's Prairie Albion: An English Settlement in Pioneer Illinois, Mark McCutcheon's Everyday Life in the 1800s, Catherine Tobin's The Lowly Muscular Digger: Irish Canal Workers in Nineteenth Century America, and Stephen O'Connor's Orphan Trains) that I've identified as good source material. I realize this is going to be a long-term, time-consuming project. But having it all transcribed and printed out, even in its rough draft form, should be a big psychological lift.

Incidentally, I'm already working on a new title to replace the somewhat hackneyed Eden. My leading contender at the moment is Furrows Through the Earth.