No news is good news

So...obviously the wait to know my fate didn't kill me! But writing 75,000 words in four weekends almost did - won't be doing that again in a hurry, though it is good to know I can be a writing machine when I want to. At least I have another novel to polish at my leisure.

I have an atrocious short term memory which means that when I write I have to jot every single idea or thought thread down in a notebook. I can't make little changes as I write without marking in the change everywhere else it will impact, else I will forget about the change and end up with a very disjointed narrative.

This happened with my first novel. I didn't know how bad my memory was then. I wrote it mostly off the top of my head, knowing the basic story outline but nothing concrete, and hoped the story would work itself out. I changed bits willy nilly as I went along, and made mental notes to go back and 'make sure to write that so-and-so has green shoes' (for eg.) Then forgot about those changes and ended up, four months later, with 60,000 words of pure confusion. It was good confusion, don't get me wrong, I was happy with what I had written, well most of it....actually, about a third of it....but the point is (see there I go again, forgetting what the point is...) it took me a further four years to work it into the book I had thought I wanted. Then I discovered that wasn't the book I wanted, and I rewrote and reorganised it again, wrote another 17,000 words, and this year I was happy with it.

Now I have two methods under my belt and I definitely favour the planned route - it works for my untidy brain - but I like the cut and paste, building an idea from scraps, add and change technique too, so I'll be doing lots of this in my redrafting.

It is now over a week since I heard back from the agent requesting a partial (makes me laugh typing that) and still no more news. How long does it normally take to hear back? And now I am convinced that an ever so polite rejection is on its way.