The Writing Life

I'm on summer break at the moment. Right now I'm scoping out new locations to write in, cheap and cozy are preferable, and a tolerant staff who'll let me nurse a green tea for an hour while I scribble are an absolute necessity. Right now I'm figuring out what to do with my novel.
There are certain moments in my draft that I think were just to get me to the next plot point. With limited time to work with I didn't have the leisure to fully unpack and sort through more difficult plot conundrums. With my outline fairly complete, I knew where I had to get to, so in some cases I just hurried up and got there. Now that I have some time to look back over the piece as a whole I know where there are weak spots and where I need to work on the plot.
I also had a brain burst the other day about the structure of the novel. I would actually love to incorporate some of the sketches I've been making for the prequel into the story. However, I wonder if that would unnecessarily complicate the book. Part of me thinks it would really add something to it and perhaps even make the focus more on the relationship between the characters which is my intent. If instead of just hearing vaguely about how the two met, we saw it. We saw the people they were before they met and then we can see the difference they've made in each other.
I'd like to try it. I'm still waiting to hear back from my professor about her thoughts on my manuscript. Part of me is terrified that she is tactfully working out a way to tell me it's not very good. Mostly though I'm just a little impatient. I never share unedited work, so I'm very curious to know what she thinks about the book and what she'll think about my new ideas.
For now I'm planting in the garden and trying to do some work on new stories. A magazine feature I wrote will be in a magazine the end of this month, so some money will also be coming my way. That is a blessed relief: my account has been cleared out to pay for my England trip so I'm almost entirely without cash.
Now I'm starting on my reading list for Oxford and daydreaming about European travel. Daydreams are an inexpensive luxury that make life much more bearable.

Editing Doesn't Completely Suck

I spent most of yesterday editing my NaNo Novel and rethinking the story arch I've been plotting. I've been contemplating using the NaNo Novel as a prequel to the series I'm working on, to be published after the first five or so sequential books. Now I'm sort of wondering if that shouldn't be just the first book.
I actually like my first book. Lord knows it needs work, but I went through and took out all the random bits that happen when you have to meet a daily word count, changed a few details about the ways the characters interact, and wrote a new ending. A productive day overall. This is weird for me, a strange place to find myself in: me liking something I've written and enjoying rereading and editing, It makes me nervous in a way, because I'm afraid the more I like it, the more crushing it will be when other people dislike it.
So far, I've let one of my friends from the literary society read it-- and I read her NaNo Novel as well. She really enjoyed it, but I'm still anxious. I've decided that I'm going to apply myself not only to editing this book and continuing to work on the second, but to finding an agent this year. I fully expect to receive some rejection letters, but they'll be tough to read. Where to begin looking? I suppose I'll have to spend a weekend combing through Writer's Market after another round of editing.
Right now I'm heading to the laundromat so that I can have some clean clothes before I get snowed in again.