And discovered, as I'd suspected, that chapters 10 and 11 were still in a muddle. They were written as the first two chapters of Dorrin's POV, and though I thought I'd cleaned them up (and they were cleaner than they had been) they were full of duplications, overlaps, gaps, and just plain non-facts. There was no way to fix them by just striking out this sentence and that--the whole logic was wrong.
R- had a big Saturday choir practice today, for the Vivaldi Gloria that his choir's doing, so I settled in to do the logic fixes...which meant writing down exactly what those chapters needed to accomplish, what each scene needed to accomplish, what each character's beginning and ending thoughts and feelings were for each scene. Then going through and rewriting the whole.
Chapter 10 went well and ended up shorter. Hurray, I thought. Gaining on the shortening aspect. Chapter 11, though, needed a new scene. I cut out two or three muddled/duplicating scenes, and thought I had gained--but in fact, the two chapters together are just as long as they were before. What was lost in 10 was gained back in 11. So the whole is not shorter. It's just better. Better is good. Better and shorter would have been better-better.
Now I'm printing out those pages, to replace in the binder, so I can keep looking at them for possible cuts. At least now I can see the flow.
Been working on this since whenever I got up and now my neck and shoulders are really stiff. Think it's time for lunch (at about quarter past two.)