I got through Lesson One in one week, which feels great. Took a look at next week’s les­son, and it is also worksheet-​intense. I may have less time to work next week, but I want the goal set to com­plete it in a week again.

Sometimes momentum is the only thing that keeps me going, and I don’t want to lose it.

So with everything prepped and ready, get­ting down to the busi­ness of revis­ing this morn­ing went very well. If I keep up with doing 65 pages a day, I will be through all of Lesson One in How To Revise Your Novel by the end of the week!

A strong start, which I intend to carry through to a strong fin­ish.

So this week I have made the time to pre­pare a new under­tak­ing. I got fur­ther in revis­ing my novel Phoenix and the Vulture than the pro­gress bar cur­rently indic­ates (will fix that soon), and then got blind­sided by other commitments.

Lesson learned? Don’t make other commitments!

The new goal is to go back to my first Nanonovel, Gift of the Ancients and give it a final revision.

This is a manu­script I’ve already spent at least a year work­ing on since it was writ­ten. I’ve made may improve­ments, but there were still some things I knew needed fix­ing, just couldn’t prop­erly define.

Going through How To Revise Your Novel will give me the tools, as it says, to “Get the novel I want from the novel I have.” I meant to cut my teeth on this course with Phoenix and the Vulture, but only made it so far. There is a time factor for get­ting Gift done, which helps me to focus, so I’m really look­ing for­ward to this. Deadlines are my friend.

Watch for pro­gress reports, which will include actu­ally sub­mit­ting the manu­script to an editor. It’s time for this Work In Progress to get to work!

…is the title of les­son two in How To Revise Your Novel, and it’s so interesting.

The basic issue is that whatever we spend a lot of words on leads the reader to believe that this item or per­son is import­ant. If you’ve plot­ted first, you will plan to do this for your main char­ac­ters and items, but in the course of actual writ­ing some­times things of no sig­ni­fic­ance at all some­how leap off the page, and when it turns out to serve no pur­pose, makes the reader feel cheated.

Not good.

So I am four chapters into dis­cov­er­ing all the places I didn’t mean to ‘lead the reader on’, and filling in work­sheets accord­ingly. Happily, hav­ing worked from good plot cards, I’m not com­ing across too many over-​described bits, but it’s still time con­sum­ing. It’s so inter­est­ing to go over the whole thing with a fine comb again though, and pay atten­tion to these kinds of details.

So I’m not ter­ribly far along, but the pro­cess is under way. I hope to get a lot more done this week­end on my LOOONG bus ride, at least once we hit the prair­ies and it’s a smoother ride.

This week I was able to read through my 2nd les­son and the demo that came with it. It will be another intense stack of work­sheets, but tech­nical dif­fi­culties are keep­ing me from print­ing them just yet.

So, I’ve been lurk­ing around the How To Revise Your Novel forum and hear­ing how oth­ers are deal­ing with the work­sheets, which is so encour­aging. I’m going to read the les­son again a few times, and plan to begin the pro­cess on Monday.

I’m look­ing for­ward to more con­sist­ent pro­gress, and plan­ning to make it hap­pen come March.