Thanksgiving and Revision

Revision Week 1

I haven’t figured out a template for these new diary entries, so this will be a work in progress over the next week or two. This week was thanksgiving and a week off from school, so my Thesis 3 class will be starting… this morning actually, as this post goes live.

I have never really revised all that much. First off, I have only finished a handful of manuscripts over the decades of my on again off again writing. My original philosophy was to fix all my grammar and typos and such, and then try to cut down my wordy paragraphs all at the same time.

Teachers Advice

My teacher has really pushed to NOT do any of the grammar or typos at all during revision, but to keep it sloppy as hell. This is with the thought that if you fix all the errors then it will feel “finished” and you’ll feel attached to your writing and not want to change things.

This has been very freeing… but I find it impossible to not fix typos and such as I read through my rough.

Other advice:

I have a lot of friends who are writers… though most of them have never sat down and really discussed their process with me. I really want to do that, and perhaps when we can all meet up again, I will start asking them all about process.

But suffice, that several of them HAVE talked about their process and one of the things I would have done (if I didn’t give myself the deadline of writing 100K in 15 weeks)… Is write day one, then day two you read and revise day ones writing before you start day two’s writing, and then you repeat that. Reading and revising the previous days work, each day. I have a feeling that that would work better for me.

As sitting down and reading through 190k and trying to take notes about what continuity errors I’ve found or how I repeated the same information in two chapters, ten chapters apart from one another… sigh… it’s tough. It’s just so much to get through.

Getting Through it…

But anyway… I had a week off of school and I have less than 9 weeks until I have to turn in my novel. Now, on one hand only the first 80k of my novel counts for my class… but personally I still need to finish the other 110k. I really don’t think I can fully revise the whole thing in 8-9 weeks… while also doing all of my class work, and my day job, and getting ready for x-mas, etc etc.

Anyway… only the first half of my book was even peer reviewed, so I have a LOT of notes for that section of the book. I think I can get through that half with some speed.

I have managed to give a polish and revision to 10 chapters of my 50-chapter book, so more than a fifth of the way there! WooHoo. With both deleting and adding words, I netted a total addition of 705 words… bringing me to 193,773 total words.

Goals:

I don’t know what a good rate of speed will be. But I want to get through another 5-10 chapters next week if I can. That should be almost enough to get me past the workshopped material (the first 22 chapters have notes, so really I need to do 12 chapters) after that it will get a LOT slower as I don’t have guides… I might try to throw up chapters in my class and see if anyone reads them…?? To be honest my class is not wholly using all of its resources. We have about 14 people in my class and only 5 of us constantly post in the none graded discussions each week. If it isn’t graded, these guys just don’t partake… and all of the workshops are optional. So… I’m not getting feedback.

Classwork

These next couple weeks look like they’re fairly light on the work load, most of it is juts polishing or posting things I already consider done. Like the outline for this novel is done. So, I only need to put together a portfolio for that and then do a journal entry. Pish posh, all done.

Then I need to workshop a few query letters for my peers, this is a graded assignment so people will actually return the favor! Yay.

Next Few Posts

Working out the format… school work, and chapters… We’ll figure this out together.