Tag: revising

Revising. Again.

I am back at revising my novel, hopefully for the final time. Exciting! It has been a long and challenging process, but I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel. This week should hopefully be The Week that I send the damned thing off to agents. Finally.

So, in order to focus, I won’t be blogging today. But I’ll be back with new and fascinating things to say later this week.

For now, I’ll leave you with this article in the New York Times about writers, including Junot Diaz and Michael Chabon, and the temptations of the internet. (See? This is why I have to sign off now.)

Revising

Oof, you guys, I don’t have much energy for blogging today, since I’ve been working on a bunch of side writing projects and — sigh — revising my novel.  I got some really great feedback from the few people I gave the manuscript to for comments, which is fantastic . . . but implementing those comments? UGH.

This process of revision is all for the good, because my novel is going to be so much better when I’m done revising,  but it’s hard. I’ve ended up rewriting whole sections, adding in weird plot twists that I didn’t see coming, and fleshing out relationships between characters.  This takes effort, but it also takes more thought than just writing with no plan, which is how I wrote the first draft of the novel.  Revising requires me to think hard about other people’s reactions to what I wrote and try to find a way to integrate changes, some of which are narrow and others of which are quite broad.  So it’s a process that forces me to be creative while forcing the story into certain constraints that will make it work better.

In short, it’s exhausting.  But it’s almost done!  So now I am going to let my brain rest and enjoy a little get-away with Al.  We’re going to the hilariously named Hartbeestpoort and are eating dinner here tonight.

Catch you all later!