Revising... and revising... and revising...

I got a little behind on revisions early in the week when I had to finish an article in time for a deadline instead.  (I am not freelancing as much as I used to, but I still am a little -- together with my busy summer schedule, it seems I may have less time for my novel than I'd planned.)  It was like that one day of doing nothing on my novel got me back out of the habit, and I've been struggling with it ever since.  I do work on it every day, but usually I only mark up a page or part of a page, either because I run out of time or I run out of patience.

Initially I didn't think revising was very hard, but I no longer feel that way.  On the surface the job doesn't seem difficult, but after revising even a page I often feel drained.  It's mentally taxing to cut up your own work like that, to read and analyze and be so focused on perfection (or as near to it as I can get).

I have a lot else to do this weekend, babysitting and working around the house; also, since the hard drive in my netbook died last week and had to be replaced, I have to work on setting up that computer all over again, and also setting up my old Averatec laptop to be used on a more regular basis.  In the midst of all this, though, I am going to try to knock out 30 pages or so of my novel manuscripts.  My normal goal for the month of June is 10 pages per day, so this will be a drop in the bucket compared to what I should be at this point (90 pages tonight as opposed to the 26 pages I'm actually at), but it will still go a long ways toward getting me back on track!

Beginning revisions

Camp NaNo has done it: It has broken the research barrier.  I've been putting off revisions of Ruby Ransome and Pandora's Box for months, until that illusive day comes to pass that I've finished all my research.  But under pressure to show some progress on the June session of Camp NaNo, despite the fact that it's not actually word count progress, I've started revisions anyway.  After all, I've done enough research to have an idea of what I want to add, so as I go through the novel I can just put in place markers for what I still need to finish researching.  For the majority of the revisions, though, research just isn't necessary.

Although I'd intended to focus my first round of revisions on the story and the history, I've found that I can't stop myself from marking up the text.  Things just jump out of at me, and I can't ignore it when I don't like a word choice, or phrasing, or a passage of description or dialogue.  So I mark it up.

So far, most pages look like this:

 

Please forgive the poor picture quality, but I don't think there's a way to take a screen shot on my Nook, and that's where I'm doing my revisions.  I'm doing them the way Stephen King suggests in On Writing -- reading through the entire manuscript, marking it up, and then going back in the actual file and making the changes -- but instead of lugging around the actual manuscript, I'm doing it in a PDF annotator app on my Nook.

But as you can see, the page is filled with orange boxes and text annotations.  (I chose the color orange to make it stand out readily without having the disapproving tone that red mark-ups tend to imply.)  It will be interesting to see how revisions go in this fashion.  I've never been a big one for revising -- with my blog posts and articles, I tend to revise as I go along, and then go back through one last time for revisions once the piece is written -- so revising a novel is pretty new for me, and I'm kind of figuring things out as I go along.

How do you do revisions?  Do you find this stage to be harder or easier than the actual writing stage?  I thought it would be harder for me, because I'm basically going back through my work and tearing it up, but I wrote it so long ago (and I'm more mature as a writer now, too, I think) that it doesn't feel as personal as it did when I was writing fiction in high school and college.  In fact, I think it's easier in a lot of ways, because it has already been written, it's already there; all I have to do is make it better!

Camp NaNoWriMo

I made a discovery last week: NaNoWriMo runs in the summer, too!  It's called Camp NaNoWriMo, and it runs two months this summer, June and August -- as in, one novel each month (with a month in between for recovery, I suppose).

I've gotten a little sidetracked, which means I haven't finished my research and the first round of revisions on Ruby Ransome and Pandora's Box.  So in June I will not actually be writing a novel -- I'll be using June and July to complete a second draft of Pandora's Box.  I'm hoping to use it as a kick in the pants to get me going again, so that I will be ready to start the second novel -- the title of which I have not yet come up with -- on August 1.

I'll update my sidebar and replace all the old NaNo stuff from November 2011 with the Camp NaNoWriMo 2012 stuff -- my badge and a link to my stats.  Remember, unless I get creative and find a way to translate my revisions into a word count, I won't have any stats to speak of in June -- but definitely start checking (and I'll start blogging about it to remind you) in August!