Category: How To Revise Your Novel
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Some days go more smoothly than others. Ohio Two Revision
This is such a weird job. Going through the type-in revision of Book Two this morning, I both laughed my ass off and then cried typing in the same scene. That particular LONG scene, now revised, held up pretty well from when I wrote Ohio 2, though I had a couple of complex fixes due…
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So today I start the type-in of the Ohio 2 Revision
I was up at six, (when you’re fasting, it’s weirdly easy to roll out of bed at the crack of dawn and be through the shower, done with the first cup of coffee, before seven AM… and at my desk and finished with necessary work emails and the one help desk ticket only I could do…
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Just finished the write-in revision of Ohio 2 — so…
I like it. I had to make one BIG change because I had a revelation when writing the first draft of Book 3 that had to be retrofitted into Book One and Two– And while I haven’t read Three since I wrote it, I think I had that revelation at the very beginning of Three.…
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Today I hit a messy part of the manuscript…
I had a small fight with myself over whether to keep two short-term characters and the scene that included them, and after some struggle and bouncing my arguments around with myself, I let them stay. They tie into an earlier incident, and my conclusion with them in this book does offer some promise that today’s…
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Character Paranoia, and the State of Revision
I’m past the halfway mark on the read-through-note-taking process on Ohio 2. I have a lot of the first draft that I’ll be able to use as is. That’s good. I have written novels where I discovered the first draft was The Story I Don’t Want To Tell (and could still run into that in…
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Made it to page 188 on the write-in revision of Book 2
And I’m very, very happy with the way this book is going. The story made me laugh multiple times, got me a bit teary-eyed once, and the plot through this part of it held together tightly still getting some necessary backstory into the mix. And reading through and writing stuff in and making changes, I…
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Revelation Struck!!!
You grind. You dig. You read with increasing despair through a manuscript that seemed while you were writing it like a thing of wonder. You wonder how you could have gone so far off the mark. And you think, “How did I think this was going to work?” and consider the possibility that you’re going…
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I’m annoyed with myself — Ohio 2 revision read-through, markup… and an unanticipated issue
So I’m all the way through page 422 on the read-through of Book 2. There are 431 printed pages in the first-draft manuscript, and you’d think, wouldn’t you, that being this close to the end of the book, I’d just finish the read-through and mark-up today? Usually, I would. But I’ve been hitting some walls…
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Read-through write-in revision of Ohio 2 now done through page 233 of 431
Read-through/write-in notes today flew, with Book 2 being a remarkably clean first draft (not even a lot of typos)… …Right up to the point where it wasn’t. In the last three novels, I changed some of the worldbuilding that I did in Two to something much better. And when I ran into the spot where…
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Seventy-five pages of revision on Ohio Two… (evil grin)
I’m discovering there a massive advantages in writing five novels back to back. The stories are connected in your head while you write them. And then they’re connected in your head while you revise them. On the writing side of this, seventy-five pages into Book Two, I haven’t had ANY continuity errors from what I…