June Books: Still 4/9 (oh no)
Hey ho, squiders, how are you? It is a million degrees here and only getting hotter, god I hate summer and also climate change.
Still not making much progress on my revision, and feeling very wishy washy about the whole thing. I did sit and ponder for a bit this afternoon about why this might be, and I suspect it’s something like I really enjoyed it when I read through it, and then running it through the critique gauntlet has unleashed a whole bunch of issues I didn’t see, and now I don’t quite know what to do with myself.
And, I bet you, the reason why a whole bunch of issues I didn’t see is coming up is because I didn’t do my normal revision prep because I felt really good about its state.
(I went and looked at what revision prep I did, and it was basically my plot sentence and a list of problems I noted when reading, almost all of which are continuity errors.)
The revision prep is A Lot. I feel like, for Book 1, it took me almost six months to get through. It involves systematically going through all aspects of the story–characters, worldbuilding, items, theme, pacing–as well as looking at each individual scene and determining what its point is, if it’s important to the story, what the conflict is, etc.–and then re-outlining based on all the crap you’ve gone through and looked at.
It’s very thorough, and it takes a hot minute, but I don’t tend to need to do another revision after the fact (aside from line edits).
So, of course, it’s a large undertaking, and sometimes it can be very…overwhelming to get into. And I think, with starting the revision process with my scifi horror and finding myself not really feeling the story, the thought of going through it again (especially when it felt like the story was working!) was not appealing and so I just…didn’t.
But what do I do now? Is it worth it to continue doing what I’m doing when I’m getting mixed feedback from my in-person group and the critique marathon? If I stop I will probably miss the rest of the marathon, which is not ideal, but getting feedback on a draft that needs work may not be the best use of anyone’s time either.
I mean, arguably, continuing with the current draft will put additional eyes on the problems, which may mean that when I do the full revision it will be more complete.
But even by that logic, the revision I have been doing, which involves fixing continuity errors, cleaning up filtering and word overuse, and working on the pacing, is basically for naught. I should maybe just run the existing draft through the marathon and give up on the current rewrite.
And then I work on the revision prep while getting feedback on the first draft? But does that make sense? Some of the prep may change based on feedback.
So run the first draft through the critique marathon/critique group and…do something else?
Good grief.
At least the morning pages are fun.
How are you, squider? Getting things done in a less frustrating manner than some of us, I hope.
