Revision... Eight Hours So Far...

Okay... so I got started at 2:00pm today... late start after playing golf. So shoot me.

However, I've been pretty much nose to the grindstone since then, and it's 11:15pm now. Short break to walk kids home from bus stop. Maybe a half hour to get dinner on the table. Handed the kids off to the wife, who graciously let me disappear. Every other minute has been in this chair.

So, instead of recording word counts for these next couple of weeks, I'll record hours of revision time... so... nine and a half minus about an hour or so... I'll round it down to eight hours for the day.

Good stuff so far... As I have learned in the past, the looming dark clouds of revision make it all seem so impossible, never ending, hopeless, but I knocked some major shit off my list today... really... Cranking through. It's never as bad as I thought it was going to be.

*** ONCE AGAIN, I'M LEARNING THAT IT'S ALL PART OF THE PROCESS, DAMN IT!!! ***

One big thing I started doing today that I will do a lot more in the future. Started using Word's highlighting feature to flag parts of the text so I can go back to fix things of similar types.

I made three passes through the manuscript. Not reading the whole thing word-for-word, but scanning at a moderate speed... knowing exactly what was going on in each scene, chapter, etc... scanning slowly enough to read words and phrases and know where I was, but fast enough to get through the manuscript in about an hour and a half or so...

First pass, I went through for the big nasty... the hundreds of places where I'm telling instead of showing, and I included in this pass those areas (and there were dozens) where I felt I could beef up the description a bit... maybe climb inside the character a little more and just take a look/smell/hear around the scene... and maybe show the reader what's around me a little bit... In every section that I felt needed more showing ("She looked so frustrated..." for example) or that I felt needed more description, I highlighted in pink.

Then I did another pass... this time scanning at pretty much the same speed but looking for repetition - phrases, words, etc... (Dear God, how many times did I say "awkward silence" or "awkward moment" or "awkward pause"?) I highlighted repetition in blue.

Then I did another pass, looking for problem areas. Way awkward dialogue, abrupt transitions, hard scene landings and chapter endings, etc.. This pass took a little longer, but I did some of it during the other two passes, switching highlight colors back and forth occasionally. I labeled these problem areas with red highlighting.

So, tomorrow I will sit down with all this highlighted bullshit and (theoretically) be able to go through, just focusing on the highlighted chunks (and believe me, it's probably half the manuscript, but at least I know what I'm up against) rather than reading and rereading and rerereading the manuscript.

Once I get all that done, I still have some big-ticket revision items on my to-do list (more global changes needed, etc.)

Then, finally, I will print the whole fucker out for the first time and sit and read it with my blue pen in hand, doing final copy edit, buffing and polishing, word choices, punctuation, silly typos I didn't catch on the screen (I'm always so much more critical in hard copy... weird... I always wonder about our generation... I'm sure you're like me in that you went from writing on paper to typing what you'd written on a typewriter... then computers came out and you wrote stuff on paper and then typed it into the computer, and like me you can probably peg within a year or so when you crossed that line between writing freehand (to type later) and composing directly on the screen. I can't even write freehand anymore... I've tried a couple of times recently. I suppose if I were stranded on an island with a ream of college ruled notebook paper and a pencil I'd have to learn to make due... but I can't imagine writing, composing, on anything but a computer screen)

Jesus... I'm writing another book in this blog... I guess after all this revision time I needed to tap a vein for a while...

Fuck all the people who say they love this shit... fuck 'em all...

But I do... I know it deep in my soul... it is what I am... I must do it, and deep down I know I love it... I know I do... so fuck me too, I guess... call me a hypocrite cuz people who say they love this shit make me want to puke... but I do

God, I love it... I love it...