Despite hav­ing all my chil­dren home today, I got the organ­isa­tional end figured out for les­son two and began filling in worksheets.

It will be another intens­ive week, read­ing the entire mss again look­ing for spe­cific things. My goals will be 65 pages per day for the next four days again in order to get done on time, and well.

It feels so good to start when there’s momentum behind you!

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.

Despite a slow start, I got my quota for today again!

I’m at page 195 of a 250 page mss. The momentum helps, and I feel good about all the little things I’m catch­ing. It’s good to know that this is going to be the FINAL revi­sion, and it will be as good as I can make it at my cur­rent skill level.

Tomorrow I will be done les­son one!

I don’t con­sist­ently have the men­tal endur­ance I want for writ­ing, but I conquered another 65 pages of revi­sions today in three hours time, des­pite a slug­gish brain. I am well on track to fin­ish this first round on Friday.

Yesterday I had some glor­i­ous minutes, I don’t know how long, where it was all going swim­mingly and I was in the zone. It’s good to know such a thing is pos­sible, but I’d live there if I could! Perhaps it will come more fre­quently as I practice.

Go me.

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.

Today I spent some hours com­pil­ing my manu­script so I have a hard copy from which to go about the revi­sion pro­cess. The prob­lem was I’d brought chapters into my won­der­ful Scrivener soft­ware from so many dif­fer­ent sources (gmail docs, Neo Office, PDFs, RTFs, all kinds of mad­ness) that it man­aged to mess up the pre-​set offi­cial manu­script set­tings in sev­eral (but not all) documents.

I fixed the extra spaces between para­graphs, but I’m not sure what to do with chapters that had all their para­graphs double-​indented, or how to get back the pre-​set format for new chapters. This is the part of writ­ing that I hate! My won­der­ful in-​house geek (hus­band) will surely be able to help, but for now, I have what I need to start revising.

And yes, next time I will write that whole darn thing in Scrivener and not have to deal with this mess!

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.

Well, it was fairly gruel­ing but cer­tainly edu­ca­tional to do a first crit­ical read-​through of my Nanonovel while tak­ing extens­ive notes. I man­aged it in two days, and I’m look­ing for­ward to fix­ing the messy bits.

The good news is there are still lots of things that I love, and hope­fully that will encom­pass all of the book by the end of this course.

And of course I always get a thrill just from watch­ing the pro­gress wid­get advance.