A nasty combo of the flu, returning to work for close to full time for the first time since the wreck, and a fairly major depressive episode managed to neatly take me 1-2-3 out of pretty much everything, including writing and blogging. But I am slowly crawling back to full speed, although it might take me a bit to get back to even a rapid crawl.
Before I was so rudely interrupted by my body, I was working on finishing the first in-depth revision of Moving on Nightfall, with about 20ish pages left to go. (I say 20ish because I have less, but there are some parts I need to expand, so the page count will go up slightly.) Revising is hard work. There are times I really like it, such as when I take a story that is very rough and make it open and exposed and clear. And turning a mediocre rough draft into a good piece of writing is great fun. Revising short stories takes a lot of time, but there is a clear end in sight, 2, 7, 13, 22 pages. Easy enough goals to see the end of.
Revising a book however, is quite different. When I was writing the first draft of Moving on Nightfall, I was focused on getting it down, so I ended up with many contradictions in plot, and characters turned out much differently than I planned. Pushing out the last fifty pages was hard; I was tired of the story, frustrated about the ending, and I just wanted it done. So obviously, when I went back to start revising, I thought it would be easier than writing those those last 50 pages.
Yeah right.
Revising a work of this length is a lot of work- especially since there were so many plot kinks I needed to work out and so many characters I needed to shape more fully. And since the end of the book was harder for me to push out, the further along in revising I got, the harder it was because of all of the abbreviated scenes and tripped up plots lines. This last 20ish pages to go and the 30 before those have been really hard. So I am pushing hard to finish revising this last section, and I know it will feel good when I finally get it done, but damn, it is a pain in the ass.
I actually think (hope) that perhaps the next revision is going to go a lot smoother, simply because I have fixed a lot of the knots and can focus more on language and flow. At least, that is what I am telling myself. 
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March 24th, 2008 - 11:25 pm
Congrats on nearing the end of your first pass…that has to be a huge undertaking. Since I haven’t revised anything longer than a longish short story, did you set up any sort of structure towards your revision? Like did you fix plot holes first, and then character stuff? Or did you just go through linearly? Or something else?
March 25th, 2008 - 12:13 am
Wow, that’s a lot of lot of work.
When I write longish things, I revise the last few pages every time I come back to it to write more.
March 28th, 2008 - 12:04 pm
I revise as I go along. I know there is a large school of thought that says this is a flawed way to approach it, but I find that I cut a quarter of my length when I do hard edits. This way, I don’t end up short on whatever word count I sort of decided I was shooting for. Also, the idea of approaching a really big stack of pages in the harrowing stage sort of scares me.
But…I do a gang of pre-plotting so most of what I’m doing is really boring language, grammar and punctuation passes. Once it is stripped down and settled I can more easily figure out things that aren’t quite right in the story.
But, yeah–it’s the hardest part. That–and waiting for it to settle. I really love my babies right after they pop out, but it takes a while to really see them in all their glorious ugliness.
April 1st, 2008 - 6:19 pm
[...] wrote about the stress of revising my novel last week, and how with a long work sometimes I find it a challenge to make it all of the way [...]