Noted

It took three weeks, but my read aloud of my current WIP is finally done. I made a note every time I found something that needed fixing and…well, it’s not pretty. There are 853 of them. Or, on average, eight per page.

Eep.

Of course it’s an important thing to be able to, you know, make the book readable, but man, is it daunting. Half of them are me yelling at myself for not using enough description or ordering me to get rid of dialogue tags (I can get very bossy in my notes to myself). It’s just plain a mess, but it might be good someday.

So what’s next on my writing to do list? Fixing all those notes, obviously. But I also wrote out the timeline for it to make sure there are no continuity snarls and improve the pacing, so I’m going to do that first, and since that will involve a lot of moving chapters around, I’m probably going to need more notes to fix all the problems shifting things around will cause.

Eep. Again.

But through it all, I really feel excited. I have a plan! I know how to fix (most of) the problems! MALICE is turning into a real book! Although this doesn’t mean those of you who follow me on Twitter won’t be seeing a lot of whining about edits. Complaining is my muse.

So that’s my writing update this week. What are you up to with your WIP? What do you do when you start revisions? Do share!

Woo!

First of all, I could still use some guest posts for the end of the month. Give me a shout out if you’re interested.

Second, I finished another book! Woo! And by “finished” I mean I finished a rough draft that I can already tell needs revisions that will take months to complete, probably longer than the initial rough draft took if the past is any indication.

I…umm. Less woo.

However, it’s still a nice accomplishment. I promised myself I’d finish it by the end of the month and I did. Actually, I was getting a little worried that I might not make it, not do to a lack of writing, but rather because the book just kept getting longer. The “final” word count is about 94 K, which makes it 20 K more words than the last rough draft I completed. I guess I had a lot to say with this one.

Now that I’m done, I’m feeling a little writer’s burnout, and I don’t think I’d be at my best if I started editing it right away. So what’s the solution? Edit something else of course! I still have GLITCH to work on. Draft two is done, but it’s been neglected as I focused my energies on the shiny new project (working title: COLLAPSE). Time to get back in the game. I’m swearing off the new book until September (and boy, is that hard!), maybe even October if I don’t make serious gains towards the apocryphal “completion”. Then it’s back to beta readers…

How’s writing going for you? Any editing tips you’d like to share?

Quite A Task

I was vacuuming the other day when it hit me: one of the plot points in my book is unnecessary. It adds nothing except a bunch of characters that are never seen again and could be written out with very little effect on the rest of the story.

I believe at that point, I turned off the vacuum and found a desk to lay my head on. Because this means a whole boat load of revisions. Just because it doesn’t affect the rest of the story doesn’t mean it’s easy to extract. I have thirty five thousand words, close to half of my book, that need to be edited, rewritten and added to.

My reaction was something like this:

My drawing skills get better all the time.

 

So, yeah. If you don’t hear form me in the next few weeks, assume I’ve been buried under an avalanche of words.

What about you? Any good editing arg-I-can’t-believe-I-missed-that stories to share?