Correspondence from the Front: Revision update
Jul 15, 2010 
I’ve gotten off to a rather rocky start with my revision process. I suppose it’s only fair, because when I started writing the first draft I got through the first 30,000 words of it almost without a hitch–it’s about time I hit some speed bumps. Part of the problem has come from outside the writing sphere–I got the mother of all migraines this past weekend, landing me in the ER for treatment and then unable to look at a computer screen for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time for a couple days. Mostly I’ve been rewriting the first chapter over and over, until I got to the point where I started feeling a bit like a broken record just skipping through the same words over and over again, stuck in that one groove.
I’m not exactly sure what I did to get out of it, except resurface day before yesterday and just move on. At some point you have to just admit you’ve done what you can, and decide to leave it to your readers and critiquers to help figure out what’s wrong.
Last night I spent a couple of hours going over my outline with , my first reader. I’m incredibly lucky to have her, because A) she is ridiculously smart, B) she knows me so well that she says every bit of critique in exactly the right way, and C) she is inexplicably dedicated to helping me. Together we went through the outline and plucked out the scenes that are only really serving one purpose, and figured out how we could insert that into a different existing scene, in the interest of cutting the deadwood. We also completely revamped the ending, which in the original draft was pretty flat–something I knew at the time, but I was so eager to finish that I didn’t care. It still ends the same way, just with a much more immediate, visceral, and ACTION PACKED version of it. And I’m actually glad I didn’t try to force something better at the time I was writing it, because if it wasn’t so clearly bad I might not have been so driven to find something better, and this new spin on the ending may never have occurred to me. What I’m left with after that totally exhaustion brainstorm and revision planning session is a sense that I’m not actually anywhere near as bad off as I’d thought. There are a few parts that need serious overhauls (the beginning and the end, mostly) and a few scenes that need cutting, but in general I’m doing okay.
Anyway, I’m now about 11,000 words into the second draft of THE IRON WOOD. It’s not very far, but I did the bulk of that revision (first chapter not included) in one day, and if I can do that then I can definitely get through the rest in a reasonable amount of time. My goal is to be onto queries before the NaNo rush after November, and there are a bunch of things that need to happen between finishing the second draft and getting to queries. So while November seems ages away, I’m looking at my To-Do list and thinking time is getting pretty tight.
So, in the interest of getting through it, I’m just going to do what I did when I was writing the first draft, and hold myself accountable to a daily goal that I cannot, will not, miss for any reason. And to make sure that I hold myself accountable, I’m going to put it out here like I did my 500 words per day goal. It turns out revision, for me, isn’t really like original writing, so I don’t really want to do a daily word count. But I’m going to say that I’m going to revise AT LEAST one chapter a day, with the caveat that some chapters are going to be really light/quick, and if that’s the case I’ll do at least two. But at least one chapter a day means that I’ll be done with the second draft by early August at the latest (I’m guessing it’ll more be a couple weeks at most) which gives me a good chunk of time to get through the stuff I need to do pre-queries.
How about it, guys? Up to listening to me babble about a daily goal for another month? 🙂
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Woohoo! Good luck with your daily goal, I know you can do it! (P.S. I saw a YA book by”M. Spooner” today. Thought of you XD
It’s true. Spooners will take over the world. Just you wait and see.